Part II - Critical Engagement of and with Environmental Violence

6 Sustainable Development How Its Pursuit Relates to Environmental Violence and Why We Should Replace It with the Concept of Sustainable Life

Alice Damiano

Environmental Violence Engaged

The concept of sustainable development, while aimed at improving both the human–Earth relationships and the relationships between humans, has problematic historical baggage: it is rooted in a Western idea of development, which is imbued in violence against various non-Western peoples and is perpetuating controversial takes on economic growth and appropriate technology. This renders the concept of sustainable development questionable, adding complications to the realization of its many, at times contradictory, goals. This chapter discusses issues in the concept of sustainable development and its implementation and relationship with environmental violence, suggesting a shift to the pursuit of a different concept: Sustainable Life.

6.1 Introduction

Sustainable development is a concept commonly referenced in reports, academic articles, and topical news alike, often included in discussions on how humanity should tackle contemporary social and environmental challenges. The expression sustainable development has become a “popular catchphrase in contemporary development discourse” [1] and has inspired an agenda adopted by all United Nations Member States [2], the Sustainable Development Agenda [2].

Despite its popularity, this concept is not free from issues, such as inconsistencies and questionable points. This chapter will consider the main issues in sustainable development and discuss how they relate to environmental violence, reflecting on how sustainable development can be part of the solution, part of the problem, or a combination of both. The argument made in this chapter is that humanity should shift its focus from the problematic concept of sustainable development to a more to-the-point concept of sustainable life. Let us begin with an overview of the expressions sustainable development and environmental violence.

The expression sustainable development has the merit of encapsulating in just two words the acknowledgment of society’s needs, the acknowledgment of the limits of the planet, and the need to address both at the same time or, more specifically, have consideration for one while addressing the other. The expression sustainable development, with what comes across as a positive and optimistic attitude, focuses on their compatibility and the possibility of a balance between the two, rather than on their facets that might conflict. This idea of sustainable development balancing different objectives and needs is present in some literature [3–5] and grey literature [6, 7], albeit the objectives/needs to be balanced vary between sources – nature and human well-being [3], economy, society and environment [4, 7], economic growth, and environmental protection [5].

The definition of sustainable development offered by the well-known 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future – “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [8] – also revolves neatly around the idea of pursuing a reasonable balance, this time between present and future generations.

However, despite its positive attitude and neat definition, the concept of sustainable development is the object of several controversies, concerning both the concept per se, and its implementation – in particular, its implementation in the form of Sustainable Development Goals [9].

The understanding of these controversies and of the broad context of environmental-social issues in which they occur can be clarified and enriched using the environmental violence framework.

In Lee’s [10] definition, environmental violence includes: (a) the violence between people(s) over natural resources; (b) environmental policies that can be violent against people; (c) the secondary violence from the natural world as a result of human degradation of the Earth; and (d) direct damage to the environment by humans that threatens their own survival.

From this point on, the notations (a–v. between people), (b–v. policies), (c–v. from nature), and (d–v. from damage) will refer to Lee’s forms of environmental violence, which will be used in this chapter along with the components of the environmental violence framework proposed by Marcantonio, Lederach, and Fuentes: structural violence (e–structural v.), cultural violence (f–cultural v.), environmental violence as pollution (g–pollution), vulnerability (h–vulnerability), and harm and power differentials (i–differentials).

These forms (a–d) and components (e–i) of environmental violence appear to be linked to the concept of balance in two ways with opposite directions, because the lack of a reasonable balance can both cause and be caused by environmental violence. Indeed, the lack of a reasonable balance in the use, distribution, and care of the Earth and its natural resources, which can be considered a form of structural violence (e–structural v.), can cause violence between people(s) (a–v. between people) and can cause environmental damage resulting in secondary violence from the natural world (c–v. from nature), harm and power differentials (i–differentials), and increased vulnerability (h–vulnerability), even to the point of threatening human survival (d–v. from damage). Conversely, the lack of a reasonable balance itself can be caused by violence between people, for example, in the form of wars (a–v. between people) or be caused by structural violence (e–structural v.) in the form of environmental policies that can be violent against people (b–v. policies), for example, a government’s decision to build a dam disregarding local people’s concerns for the effects of the dam on the local socio-ecological systems.

At first glance, since sustainable development is focused on pursuing a balance – both between human needs and planetary limits, and between present and future generations of humans – this popular concept appears to be a step in the right direction both for the sake of reaching this balance itself, and for the sake of contrasting environmental violence. However, both the implementation of sustainable development and the concept of sustainable development itself are more complicated than they seem, and a deeper look into them shows that, while they can be part of the solution, they can also at times be part of the problem.

This chapter will start considering the issues with the implementation of sustainable development in Section 6.2, before moving on to a deeper discussion of the issues concerning the concept of sustainable development itself in Section 6.3.

6.2 Issues Concerning the Implementation of Sustainable Development and Its Goals

The discussion on the issues concerning the implementation of sustainable development presented in this section revolves around one main aspect: the quality of the design of the agenda that has been developed and adopted internationally to put the concept of sustainable development into practice, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This agenda, adopted in 2015 by all the United Nations Member States [2], consists of 17 goals to be reached by 2030 [2] aimed at pursuing sustainable development.

The SDGs are considered a sustainability-oriented evolution of the former eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that originated from the 2002 United Nations Millennium Campaign [11]; they were centered on the idea of Human Development [12], were supposed to be reached by 2015 [13], and were only partially achieved [14].

The 17 SDGs are presented in table 1 of Figure 6.1, while the MDGs are presented in table 2 of the same figure. The arrows indicate the main relationships between the SDGs and MDGs (weaker and more indirect relationships have not been represented, to avoid confusion). The thicker arrows highlight the links between various SDGs and MDG 7, Ensure environmental sustainability. The presence of many SDGs related to what originally was one MDG concerning sustainability shows that the SDGs are, indeed, a sustainability-oriented evolution of the MDGs with a broader and more detailed exploration of the environmental aspects of sustainable development. These goals are associated with 169 targets and 304 indicators [12].

Figure 6.1 Table 1: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, Source: [2]; Table 2: The Millennium Development Goals, Source: [13].

The arrows added by the author connect SDGs and the related MDGs

6.2.1 The SDG Agenda: Issues Concerning Peoples and Politics

Concerning the quality of the design of this agenda, this abundance of goals, targets and indicators has been criticized, because it makes the SDGs a plan overwhelmingly complicated to follow [12, 15]. At the same time, despite this abundance of information, the vast majority of SDG targets have been accused of lacking clarity on who should do what [16], clear measurements [15, 16], and time frames [15], a characteristic that can discourage their implementation [15].

In terms of environmental violence, the issues shown by this design – especially the lack of clarity on who should do what – can directly or indirectly trigger unfair and violent environmental policies (b–v. policies, e–structural v.) and violence between people(s) directly or indirectly over natural resources (a–v. between people), exacerbating harm and power differentials (i–differentials). An example of this can be seen in the recurring disagreement, at the Conference of Parties (COPs) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), about how responsibilities and costs should be divided between countries, for example, in the case of the funding for loss and damage [17]. Another example of this is the broader upstream issue that the whole SDG/sustainable development approach is based on a Western idea of development, which makes it intrinsically disrespectful toward non-Western cultures (f–cultural v.), especially those that have been historically oppressed by violence through colonization – an issue that concerns the concept of sustainable development itself, and that will be developed in 6.3.2.1.

However, the most debated controversy concerning the SDGs is another one: the contradictions between the different goals and, at times, even within the same goal. For example, Herrera [21] points out implementation issues and contradictions within SDG 6, Clean water and sanitation, and between this SDG and other SDGs that can be pursued through the realization of dams and other water-polluting activities – namely, SDGs 7, Affordable and clean energy, and 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. Also, Scherer et al. [18], Spaiser et al. [19], and Swain [20] discuss whether or not the social SDGs are compatible with the environmental ones, finding that, while there are some solutions that can foster development and sustainability at the same time [19], working on social goals often implies increased environmental impacts [18], and concluding that “the SDG agenda will fail as a whole if we continue with business as usual” [19].

Indeed, one of the most important elements of the business as usual strategy is the pursuit of economic growth, which is part of the SDG 8, Decent work and economic growth. As Sengupta [12] argues, the SDG agenda does not answer the question “How are we to achieve sustained and inclusive economic growth while keeping in mind planetary boundaries?”, thus leaving unaddressed one of the main issues within the concept of sustainable development, the Issue of Economic Growth (see 6.3.1).

To attempt to solve these contradictions internal to the SDG agenda, some authors have pointed out the need to establish priorities between different targets [21]; to prioritize those goals that also help the achievement of other goals, such as education [22]; and to understand these goals from a system perspective, as well as the constraints, trade-offs, and social processes they imply [23]. These solutions, especially the adoption of a system perspective, appear to be a step in the right direction toward the pursuit of a reasonable balance, a balance in which goals are pursued with consideration toward the other goals, and goals are prioritized based on what works for the system. This being said, the prioritization of goals that also help the achievement of other goals might, in the author’s view, not be ideal because this would not necessarily ensure that the goals that are essential for the overall balance would be prioritized over non-essential ones.

Despite all these criticisms, it needs to be noted that the SDG agenda is the result of delicate negotiations among hundreds of countries and, thus, any change to them would need a lot of caution and be risky from a political perspective [15], potentially also resulting in violence ((a–v. between people), (b–v. policies), and/or (e–structural v.)).

Beside the controversies concerning the SDGs, the pursuit of sustainable development can pose challenges to the law of international trade [24] and can be more difficult, in general, to reconcile with the current policy, legal, and economic frameworks because of the “vagueness of the concept, the level of aggregation that is not adapted for pragmatic policy-making, the Western or Northern bias, and its voluntaristic and unrealistic view of the role of economic dynamics” [25]. The Western or Northern bias will be explored more in detail in 6.3.2.1.

6.2.2 Sustainable Development Goals and Technology

As we have seen, sustainable development revolves around a balance between human needs and planetary limits, while the definition of sustainable development proposed by the Brundtland Report [8] describes it in terms of a balance between the needs of present and future humans. Hence, sustainable development seems to revolve around two main pillars: humans and the environment. However, when it comes to the Sustainable Development Goals, that is, the implementation of sustainable development, some literature argues there is also a third key pillar: technology.

Indeed, when Hillerbrand [26] discusses SDG 7, Affordable and clean energy, she points out that the SDGs are based, not on two interconnected pillars only – humans and the environment – but on a third pillar as well, technology. According to Hillerbrand, the connections between society and technology have not been considered enough in the SDGs, leading to a failure in distinguishing between different kinds of technology, with the risk of falling into technological optimism or determinism.

Also, Sengupta [12] makes a discourse in which she seems to identify what can be considered an example of the issue presented by Hillerbrand [26]. Indeed, Sengupta [12] sees the SDG agenda as a missed opportunity, because it fails to support low-carbon solutions and to discourage high-carbon modes of production and consumption, and it tackles climate change with a technocratic approach, without stressing enough the links between SDG 13, Climate action, and the other SDGs.

If we add the environmental violence framework to the understanding of the relationship between humans, environment, and technology, we can see that technology can touch all of Lee’s forms of environmental violence because it can be involved in conflicts (a–v. between people), policies (b–v. policies), and damage to the environment that can also have negative consequences for humans (c–v. from nature, d–v. from damage). In addition, the production, use, and distribution of technology can reflect power differentials (i–power differentials), cultural and structural violence (e–structural violence, f–cultural violence), as well as be associated with further increases in pollution (g–pollution). Furthermore, the more importance humanity attributes to technological development and the more dependent humanity becomes on technology, the closer humanity becomes to creating a fifth form of environmental violence: the prioritization of technology at the expense of both human well-being and the environment. In the author’s view, as long as humans see technology as a means to improve their well-being or solve environmental issues and not as an end in itself, technology will, at most, be a contributor to environmental violence, which has only humans and the environment as causes and/or ends of environmental violence. However, the moment technology becomes an end to be pursued at the expense of human well-being and the environment, technology stops being a mere contributor, and becomes itself a cause and/or an end of environmental violence. The author does not see this additional form of environmental violence as a current reality, but as a direction humanity might be heading to, foreshadowed by some examples in which humans are already preferring more technological solutions, even when they come at the expense of human well-being and the environment. For example, the diffusion of smartphones (goods we lived comfortably without until not long ago) is linked to resource and people exploitation [27], including aspects that could be considered environmental violence. Also, Hillerbrand [26] and Sengupta [12] seem to implicitly suggest an example of questionable adoption of technological solutions, arguing that the use of technological solutions to tackle environmental problems might at times come at the expense of the big picture.

These reflections lead to the necessary addition of a caveat to Hillerbrand’s reasoning: While considering three pillars – humans, environment, and technology – can help our analysis, the third pillar – technology – should not be mistaken as equal to the other two in importance or in role. Indeed, while sustainable development aims at taking care of both human beings and the environment, it is not aimed at taking care of technology, or supporting a certain level or type of technology. If we look at the essence of what sustainable development means, technology can play the role of a means to the pursuit of a balance between human needs and planetary limits, but it should not be an end in itself and, thus, it should come second, after the other two. This is important to keep in mind, as not doing so could jeopardize the pursuit of the delicate balance between human needs and planetary limits, as well as result in the fifth form of environmental violence described earlier.

6.3 Issues Concerning the Concept of Sustainable Development

As anticipated in Section 6.2, the issues concerning the SDGs and the implementation of sustainable development signal the presence of deeper, more theoretical controversies regarding the concept of sustainable development per se.

6.3.1 The Issue of Economic Growth

The debate about SDG 8, Decent work and economic growth, raises a deeper controversy about if and how development should include or imply economic growth.

As several authors point out (e.g., [28–30]), economic growth is simply incompatible with sustainability, because it implies an increased resource exploitation, which cannot be sustainable, especially in the long term. Moreover, some authors [30, 31] challenge the idea that growth is the solution to poverty and, consequently, argue that sustainable development and the SDGs should focus more on addressing inequality and poverty directly, rather than through an economic growth that may or may not lead to solving inequality and poverty issues. In fact, the pursuit of economic growth itself is considered a social and environmental problem – notably, by the Degrowth movement [32], but also people who argue in favor of similar concepts like post-growth [33] and agrowth/growth agnosticism [34] – that should no longer be encouraged and should instead be replaced with other, more sustainable and just ways of pursuing human well-being [32–34]. Interestingly, the direct pursuit of equality can be the solution to the environmental and social problems associated with economic growth – indeed, as it has been summarized in O’Neill’s talk at TEDx Oxbridge [35]: “If growth is a substitute for equality, then equality is also a substitute for growth.”

While, at first glance, economic growth might not appear to be linked to environmental violence, there are reasons to argue that the pursuit of economic growth does, in fact, plant some of the seeds that result in environmental violence. Before discussing how, a distinction is needed: Economic growth can be intended both at the overall global level, that is, the increase of the combined economy of all the countries, and at the level of the individual countries, that is, the increase of the economy of a country, usually mentioned when discussing how a specific country is performing if compared to the others.

If we consider the growth of the global economy, it is apparent how an economy that is following a path of growth is intrinsically at odds with the possibility of a balance between human needs and planetary limits, because the central point of such a path is to depart from a balance and strongly support human needs (and wants … and even further needs and wants that would be artificially created for the sake of supporting the economy) at the expense of the planetary limits. This can easily result in damage to the environment that can increase vulnerability (h–vulnerability), cause secondary violence from the natural world (c–v. from nature), threaten the human species (d–v. from damage), cause harm and power differentials (i–differentials), and/or lead to violence among humans (a–v. between people), as has happened historically with migrations and wars originally caused by natural disasters. Also, if we consider the possible fifth form of environmental violence, we cannot help but notice how the narrative of economic growth sees technological development as a key and desirable supporter of economic growth (e.g., [36, 37]), while in the literature there is even the connection between economic growth, technological development, and war [38].

Some – including the OECD and the UN [39] – have considered the possibility of decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth [40]; however, the evidence for decoupling is limited to some environmental impacts and geographical areas, rather than covering economic-wide resource decoupling at national or international levels [39]. This (lack of) evidence exposes the decoupling of economic goods and environmental bads as a myth, as Jackson calls it in his book, Prosperity without Growth [41].

If we consider, instead, the growth of the economies of individual countries pursued for the sake of competitiveness against the performance of other countries, this can again result in dangerous damage to a country’s land done for short-term performance at the expense of long-term resilience (c–v. from nature, d–v. from damage, h–vulnerability), but it can also result, more explicitly, in violence between peoples over the use of resources, for example, in the form of wars (a–v. between people) or structural violence (e–structural violence). Because of all these reasons, while economic growth is indicated as part of development, its implications appear to be, for a substantial part, at odds with it.

6.3.2 The Issue of the Roots of Development

Why is the idea of development – in general, qualitative terms – so intertwined with the idea of economic growth in specifically economic and quantitative terms? There are at least two possible related answers.

First, because one of the dimensions of sustainable development (and development in general) is the economic one (other dimensions are, according to Redclift [42], the political one and the epistemological one). While this does not automatically mean supporting economic growth, it shows how accustomed we are to considering the economic side of anything, and to considering the economic side as one of the key dimensions.

Second, because, as noted by Banerjee [43], our idea of development is rooted in modernistic assumptions of rationality, which divide human beings from the biophysical environment, reduce the various aspects of development to economic growth, and see economic instruments as the appropriate way to protect the environment.

If the deepest controversies within the concept of sustainable development – the pursuit of economic growth, the prioritization of technology – can be attributed to the use of a modernistic Western idea of development, then perhaps the solution to these controversies, and possibly other issues in sustainable development, might be found by leaving the idea of development open to discussion from different cultural perspectives. Indeed, another controversy surrounding the concept of sustainable development is how development is defined, what it is rooted in, and how this idea of development represents – or does not represent – different perspectives. This issue concerns the representation – or lack of representation or limited representation – of non-Western cultures in the concept and implementation of sustainable development, that is, what Bruyninckx [25] called Western or Northern bias. In this chapter, a notable – albeit not exhaustive – example of this will be discussed: the Issue of Indigenous Representation (6.3.2.1).

6.3.2.1 The Issue of Indigenous Representation

The SDG agenda includes references to Indigenous peoples [44, 45], as the Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015 [46] mentions them in the political declaration and under SDGs 2 (Zero hunger) and 4 (Quality education) [44]. Also, the United Nations, in 2007, produced the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [47], which include their “right to self-determination” [47]; their “right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture” [47]; and their “right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard” [47].

However, this does not mean that the concept of sustainable development, the SDGs, and their implementation are adequately and respectfully considering Indigenous peoples, their knowledge, their perspectives, and their actions aimed at pursuing sustainability. Indeed, the Indigenous Peoples Major Group has over the years made statements [48, 49] expressing serious concerns. A main concern is their frustratingly limited inclusion over the years in both the MDG and the SDG processes. As the Indigenous Peoples Major Group expressed in a 2015 statement:

We are in merely 2 SDG targets. […] All other meaningful references over the course of the last year or more to the term “Indigenous Peoples” were a target for deletion.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted in 2007 and we are now reaching the end of the 2nd International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, yet there still seems to be the need to defend the concept of Indigenous Peoples and our rights among some member states who questioned the relevance of our inclusion in this document.

We remain concerned that if we are not explicitly and meaningfully referred to in the operative text of the SDGs, that we will encounter immense constraint and exclusion from the implementation and monitoring processes. Our experience with and invisibility within Millennium Development Goals supports this concern. Those goals also claimed to be universal. The Indigenous Peoples Major Group advocates for the over 370 million Indigenous Peoples worldwide and we insist those voices be heard and recognized throughout this document. [48]

Also, the Indigenous Peoples Major Group in a 2020 statement denounced violence that Indigenous peoples are still facing when protecting their lands:

The criminalization of indigenous peoples when they defend their lands, resources and livelihoods is also worsening in many developed and developing countries. The land and resource grab and criminalization of indigenous peoples is expected to worsen when States implement their economic growth targets for recovery from the impacts of the pandemic based on resource extraction and profit generation. […]

Indigenous peoples who are actively defending their right to the lands, territories and resources, and their right to express their critical views are being criminalized, arbitrarily arrested and detained. [49]

Hence, despite the presence of a certain level of inclusion of Indigenous peoples, the situation seems to be far from one of fairness, inclusion, and respect; changes are needed, both in terms of improving Indigenous peoples’ inclusion in the conversations on sustainable development and in terms of supporting them in their activities of protection of their lands.

One misunderstanding present in the implementation of sustainable development, and rooted more deeply in the concept of sustainable development itself, is viewing Indigenous people first and foremost as vulnerable, which is a limited and biased interpretation of reality that forgets about their right to self-determination [45]. Indigenous peoples should not be treated as mere passive receivers of help – they should be recognized and respected as agents and decision makers, have leadership positions in policy development [45], and be listened to and supported, rather than criminalized, when they defend their lands (implicitly stated in [49]). Indeed, Indigenous peoples are not just vulnerable peoples, they are also peoples whose cultures have to be respected and, in fact, have notable insights related to sustainable development.

The importance of Indigenous knowledge on sustainability has been proven and explored in the literature by various authors (e.g., [50–56]) sometimes referring to it as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) [55] or Traditional Knowledge Systems (TKS) [56]. One of many examples of their relevant insights is explained by Ole Sapit, who says that “Land for Indigenous Peoples is not just a means of production. It is an interactive space for us to engage with all of our livelihood options and opportunities” (reported by [45]). Another example is offered by the concept of Buen Vivir [51], which proposes “the idea of interdependence between society and nature and a conception of the universal as a plurality” [57]. Visions like these show an approach that does not see humans and environment as a duality with diverging needs and constraints that needs to be balanced, but as one interconnected system – a grasp of reality that shows a remarkable awareness and knowledge and, thus, should be acknowledged, listened to, and respected. Indeed, listening to these perspectives and forms of knowledge could lead to a less inconsistent idea of sustainable development, or to a different concept to pursue in lieu of sustainable development.

Moreover, Indigenous people “make up less than 5 percent of the population but manage more than one-quarter of the world’s land surface” [58], and they do realize development initiatives on their own [59]. Hence, from a practical perspective, they are already playing a massive role in global sustainability on their own terms – a role that is massive regardless of whether it is aligned with the Western concept of sustainable development. Consequently, pursuing a Western idea of development is not only biased by economic ideas, but also partial, historically unfair, disrespectful and, in the end, counterproductive too, because it suffocates non-Western approaches.

The pursuit of a Western idea of development is also connected to environmental violence, in ways that are related to, and even transcend, the four forms identified and the potential fifth one, related to technology, which is proposed in this chapter.

This happens because the popularity of a Western idea of development comes with very uncomfortable baggage: the fact that this popularity is due to historical colonization, which by its own nature, involves various forms of violence – from literal war, murder, imprisonment, and slavery, to less blatant, but still shameful, various forms of cultural oppression and everyday discrimination – practiced for the sake of controlling territories and peoples.

The popularity of a Western idea of development, the fact that this idea of development is considered the “standard” one, and the very idea that there should be a development in the first place is an expression of environmental violence associated with violence between people(s) over resources (a–v. between people); violent and unfair environmental policies (b–v. policies, e–structural violence); damage to the land that can cause secondary violence from the natural world (c–v. from nature) or threaten humanity (d–v. from damage); and a prioritization of technological development over human needs and environmental limits (author’s fifth form of environmental violence).

More importantly, at a deeper level, the popularity of a Western idea of development also affects the very systems – cultural, political, legal, and social – that determine what is right and what is not, what is fair and what is not, what is violence and what is not – a clear case of cultural violence. This represents a transcendent, ultimate type of environmental violence: the imposition of a view, of a way of life, of a cultural and ethical framework to establish what is right and what is wrong over peoples that do not consent to it, oppressing them, their cultures, and their relationships with the land, while also damaging the land in the process – all for the sake of dominating peoples and lands. From the author’s perspective, when the environmental violence framework proposed by Marcantonio, Lederach, and Fuentes is applied to the idea of development in a context of colonization, the “cultural violence” component emerges as the main driving force of environmental violence, and thus the most critical to understand and address. How should sustainable development be (re)considered in the light of all this?

6.4 Conclusion: From Sustainable Development to Sustainable Life

At the beginning of this chapter, sustainable development was described in terms of its essential components: the human–environment duality, the aspirational pursuit of a balance between human needs and planetary limits, and the relationship between the lack of such balance and the presence of environmental violence. Then, various issues in the concept of sustainable development and in its implementation have been discussed, also making references to environmental violence and the pursuit of a balance, when appropriate, in the author’s view. In the light of this discussion, what are the main takeaway messages of this chapter?

First, one reason why the concept of sustainable development is so popular is that it summarizes very neatly the direction that humanity should take according to the mainstream cultural vision, that is, the Western cultural vision. However, just because this concept offers a nice summary of this desired direction – improving human conditions in a sustainable way – does not mean this direction is clear or reachable. In the case of sustainable development, the contradictions between some of the SDGs; the lack of clarity of many objectives; and the high number of objectives itself make this direction more confused than it originally appears. These issues can cause – unintentionally and/or intentionally – injustice, which can result in environmental violence.

Second, this direction relies too much on economic growth and technological development, goals that are, to some extent, at odds with the main purpose of sustainable development and can jeopardize it, while also creating the right environment for environmental violence to occur.

Third, this direction is, as already said under the first point, based on a Western cultural vision, and the very fact that this vision has been made mainstream at the expense of other peoples and cultures represents the ultimate transcendent form of environmental violence – a form of cultural violence that has been present for centuries, since the beginning of colonization at the hands of some European nations. Because of this, if any fair sustainable development is to be implemented, the goals, definitions, and measurements of its development component need to be reconsidered in the light of the cultures that have been oppressed and in general of all the cultures that have not been adequately represented so far, and the ways to achieve its sustainable component can and should also be informed by these cultures.

Fourth, this chapter began with the consideration that the term sustainable development nicely encapsulates human needs and planetary limits, with the imperative to not pursue one without consideration for the other. Based on the discussion that followed, this description needs two corrections.

The first is that if humans and the Earth are, in fact, one interconnected system – as highlighted by some reported Indigenous views – then the balance is not between human needs and planetary limits, but between human and planetary needs. This alternative definition shows, in the author’s view, more respect and consideration toward the Earth because its environment is now, not only perceived as something that can cater to human needs, but only within certain limits, but as a subject that has its own needs that need to be respected and met.

The second one is that in the expression sustainable development, sustainability and development do not seem to carry equal weight: development is the noun, while sustainable is an adjective attributed to that noun – hence, implicitly, the development component takes the lead role. This represents an issue, because – as we have seen – it is the development component, not the sustainable one, that presents the issues discussed in this chapter. Hence, while it would be difficult to argue that humanity should not live sustainably when the Earth is showing us that some of its planetary boundaries have been dangerously trespassed [60], it can, however, be argued that, since the mainstream idea of development proposed by sustainable development is problematic and not universally shared, we need to reconsider not only what kind of development we want, but also if it truly is mandatory to have development.

For this reason, this chapter suggests the replacement of the concept of sustainable development with the less debatable and more sustainability-oriented one of sustainable life.

A Concluding Message from the Author

You will move me that day too

Sitting on a rock

in the middle of a field

I was being enfolded

by a dancing gust of wind

turning and whispering

during its stay

then calling the leaves

and going away.

But it wasn’t just a friend

or a travelmate

the background of a painting

or the shaking of a landscape

it was there, and it was energy

the sign of a life

that goes beyond mine.

A warm, vibrating life

of reassuring, solar light

a life that sometimes twirls

with fresh ribbons made of wind

and those brave waterfalls

that dive from the cliffs

in marvelous ponds

while the ocean currents every day

chase each other

in an endless game

and the geothermal warmth

silently heats

the planet like a heart

does with its beats.

… but I am one of those irresponsible

and ungrateful human beings

that ignored so naively

all these energy gifts.

I am one of those tiny brains

who believed they knew it all

and I am one of those tiny lives

who thought every right belonged

to their own interest and pleasure

beyond any considerate measure.

I am one of those, indeed

who exhumed at a dangerous speed

coal, oil and also gas

buried treasures of the past

everything burnt in a blink of an eye

in a nearsighted capricious lifestyle.

… but awakening the dead is not wise

and neither is picking the same flower twice …

And now that the dream belongs to the past

a biased equilibrium is what is left

corpses scattered out of empty graves

new and unknown dangers to face …

What can I say?

What can I do?

I am the guilty to blame

I’m not allowed to complain

I can only stop and look around

then apologize stooping down

in the dustbin I shall throw the claims,

those huge requests that now I must pay

and I shall use, with respectful measure

the gifts spontaneously given by nature.

And in the end I shall listen to the speech

that is gently sung by the gust of wind …

… this gust of wind is messing

my hair and my soul …

This gust of wind says that a piece

of the Great Life

is breathing through me

partly matter and partly soul

being humile and serious shall be my goal

energy is what I took

and what I will return back

the matter I am made of

shall not be wasted

now I am using it, but it’s not mine

and now I feel I can talk

to the Great Life:

You don’t belong to me

I belong to you

one day I’ll come back to your arms

and you will move me that day too.

7 The Affluence–Technology Connection in the Struggle for Sustainability

John Mulrow , Alex Jensen , and Daniel Horen-Greenford

Engaging Environmental Violence

Technology will play a role in addressing environmental violence. Some common technological aims include: more equitable access to cleaner and safer industrial techniques; wider deployment of pollution safeguards; and the transition of energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels and toward batteries and renewables. Of course, alternative technologies do not address many of the structural and cultural factors involved in generating environmental violence. Shifting from one mechanism to another, or one material to another, entails a shift in economic context, but guarantees nothing about whether this new context will be more equitable, or even ecologically responsible. We propose that, in order for technology deployment to be truly appropriate to the task of reducing environmental violence, economic affluence must be an equally primary factor of concern. In this article, we introduce the “affluence–technology connection” and provide several different contexts and perspectives to support the concept. These include appropriate technology efforts in Ladakh, India, the carbon footprint of alternative transportation technologies, and the true impact of service sector versus industrial sector activities. These lead us to a fairly simple conclusion: Achieving a lower-violence future means seeking appropriate affluence alongside appropriate and sustainable technologies.

7.1 Introduction

The economy is a subsystem of the environment, that is, the physical Earth and its daily dose of sunlight. By turning resources from this macro-system into products and services, humans meet their needs and create new ones. We use “technology” to drive this process and also to deal with the consequences. Waste and pollution are captured and stored away from human exposure; resource use becomes more efficient, allowing greater swaths of people to afford technological benefits; and automation removes humans from physical harm and drudgery, improving the quality of life. However, technological advancement also tends to come with greater power over the Earth: larger and more powerful machines capturing more materials and expanding humanity’s reach further into ecological territory. We may use technology to protect local environments, but we also use it to provide greater levels of affluence. As we ratchet up material comforts and services for ourselves, we draw on the total environment – the one global ecology shared by all life.

In this article, we confront technology’s mixed contributions to this conundrum, asking whether and how technology may be guided toward true sustainability. First, we discuss the famous IPAT (Impact Population Affluence Technology) equation, relating environmental impact to population, affluence, and technology parameters (Section 7.2). This establishes the foundation for exploring the affluence–technology connection, a crucial intersection on the uncertain path to ecological sustainability. Many fields of thought, analytical approaches, and ancient wisdom can be found at this intersection and we touch on several.

We go to Ladakh, a region of the Himalayas, to explore a tradition of appropriate technology that differs from the typical developmental idea of the concept (Section 7.3). There, a fusion of traditional and modern technologies demonstrates a promising type of appropriateness that incorporates certain global technologies into a slower, more land-based way of life. Ladakh sets an example, but it is one not easily emulated in the Global North, where high speed and constant material turnover are the norm. What would it look like to cultivate affluence-limiting technology in this context?

To get at this question, we then explore the limits and opportunities of technology, focusing on the transportation (Section 7.4) and service sectors (Section 7.5). Finally, in Section 7.6, we call for technological “progress” to be pursued with slower speeds, greater deliberation, and lower consumption as target metrics. On such a path, we can enjoy technological breakthroughs and a thriving environment, within the bounds of appropriate affluence.

7.2 The Affluence–Technology Connection

In the spring of 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers who ran a bicycle production and repair shop in Ohio, mounted a four-cylinder engine onto the massive glider they had been testing on windy Atlantic Ocean beaches [1]. They used the gliding experience to develop a wing-warping mechanism for managing the natural lift provided by winds. Now they would provide on-board lift capability with a pair of propellers powered by an engine. The engine was designed and built with tools available at their bicycle shop and was made significantly lighter than normal with the purchase of an engine block made entirely of aluminum. This metal had only recently become affordable thanks to the spread of electricity generation, electrolysis being the key step in the new aluminum-smelting process [2]. In December 1903 the brothers would record their famous first flight over the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Wright Flyer Photographs (L) Custom-built 8-horsepower engine [3]; (R) Famous first flight [4]

This brief history describes two bicycle mechanics and their innovative leap into a new, higher-speed realm of transportation. It is a classic tale of ingenuity and discovery that changes the course of human events. Or perhaps that moment of innovation was more inevitable than monumental. Several technological advances converged at that time so that powered human flight was finally materially and energetically possible; it was being experimented with in several places across the world at that time [5]. Today, almost 120 years later, powered airplanes dot the sky above every major city in the world and flying is a normal and expected part of both personal and professional lives. International travel has, in turn, globalized our lives, but it has grown up alongside the globalization of pollution as well. We now live in an age where the byproducts of human activity are encroaching on global ecological functions, such as climate regulation, temperature, and the oceanic chemical balance [6].

The Wright brothers’ story is a reminder that past approaches to technological progress – while scientifically sound and physically impressive – may no longer fit with the socio-ecological realities of today. Mainstream characterizations of “sustainable technology” still largely praise the kind of convergent efficiency improvements from which the Wrights benefited in 1903: more efficient methods of material extraction and manipulation; more rapid experimentation and information sharing; and the exploitation of new energetic capabilities. While this combination of factors could combine to lessen our demands on the Earth, their effect on affluence – delivering faster and higher quantities of goods and services – tends to outdo the potential gains.¹ This affluence–technology connection lies at the root of our global environmental conundrum.

7.2.1 Framing Technology’s Role in Sustainability

A common framework for consideration of the human-Earth system is the IPAT decomposition in which:

$\begin{array}{c}\text{Impact}=\text{Population}\times \text{Affluence}\times \text{Technology}\\ \text{or}\\ \text{Impact}=\left(\#\text{of}\text{people}\right)\times \left(\frac{\text{activity}}{\text{person}}\right)\times \left(\frac{\text{impact}}{\text{activity}}\right)\end{array}$

The IPAT identity evolved from a debate among environmental thinkers in the 1970s and 80s centered on the question of what driver was most responsible for global ecological degradation [10, 11]. The debate largely focused on population questions versus “faulty technology” whereas affluence was considered as an indicator of societal progress or development [12]. Indeed, many presentations of the IPAT equation use GDP per capita as the Affluence metric, GDP being the World Bank’s primary metric for economic health [13].

The structure of the IPAT equation is such that, in order to reduce impact from one period to the next, at least one of the factors must be on the decline. Slowing the growth of some or all factors can help mitigate impacts, but growth of one or more factors must be reversed to actually decrease impacts. It stands to reason that Technology, structured as impact per activity (often Impact/GDP or Impact/Energy), has been the prime candidate for reversal [7]. Behavioral and cultural aspects of society can be largely ignored and the task assigned to engineers whose job it has always been to reduce resource use – and by extension “impact” – per unit of useful work [5, 14].

But the difficulty technology has, and will continue to have, in combating both population and affluence/activity rise is demonstrated in Figure 7.2. Here, data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and World Bank are used to chart world energy use (in Terajoules, TJ) during the period 1990–2014 [15, 16]. The components of world energy use mirror those of the IPAT equation. Final energy is the product of Population, Affluence (Gross World Product (USD) per capita), and Technology (energy required per unit GWP). Energy use and per capita wealth have risen in a synchronized manner, with the only major dip in energy use occurring in conjunction with economic downturn in 2009 [17, 18]. Technology, framed here as the energy intensity of the economy (kJ/GWP), has indeed improved in efficiency, but has been unable to keep pace with economic and population growth.

Figure 7.2 World Energy Use, 1990–2014, composed of Population, Affluence, and Technology parameters

7.2.2 Positive Feedbacks and the Rebound Effect

Observing technology, as defined in the classic IPAT equation, and focusing solely on impact per unit of activity, the achievements of sustainable technology and engineering are impressive. Some achievements that have particularly benefited technological interventions in developing country settings are described in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1 Modern technology and associated efficiency metrics

Technology	Metric	Efficiency improvement	Source
Light-emitting diode (LED) lighting	Lumens per watt (lm/W)	A typical household lamp light draws 9W with LED technology, compared to 60W for its equivalent-light incandescent predecessor	[19]
Photovoltaic electricity generation	Solar energy input per electricity output (%)	Module efficiencies reached 40% in 2019, compared to a maximum of 20% in 1990	[20]
Insect-resistant (IR) crops	Yield (Harvested mass per area planted)	From 1996 to 2015, IR traits are credited with global yield increases of 13% for maize and 15% for cotton	[21]
Precision irrigation	Water uptake per water applied (%)	Drip irrigation systems equipped with soil moisture sensors improve efficiency by 3–19%	[22]
Additive manufacturing	Energy per product	Small-scale 3D printers can reduce energy inputs by 41–64%	[23]
Information processing	Transistors per integrated circuit (# per die)	Computing capability per circuit has improved exponentially, from 100 in 1970 to 1011 in 2017	[24]
Batteries	Energy density (kWh per kg)	Improved from 150 to 300 kWh/kg between 2010 and 2020	[25]

With the analytical borders drawn solely around a single technological parameter – as in Table 7.1 – it is possible to ignore important ways that technological progress feeds back (positively or negatively) to population and affluence. This can lead to what are called “rebound effects,” in which the savings from reduced pollution, resource inputs, or production effort are invested in the growth of production activities [26]. This is sometimes referred to as a “paradox,” but is, in fact, a natural consequence of most energy engineering efforts in the modern age [27, 28]. For example, improving the efficiency of cars reduces the gasoline and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions consumed and emitted per distance driven, but overall, there is an absolute increase in gasoline consumed and GHG emissions from driving due to this rebound effect. Rebound is not only a characteristic of consumer choices, it manifests just as fundamentally in the engine of capital itself, where money saved through improvements in material efficiencies are reinvested into production, which ultimately grows production and its attendant impacts more in absolute terms, even when relative gains to efficiency are achieved [29].

Innovators and researchers claiming environmental benefits from technological or infrastructural change are increasingly being called to address the potential for rebound effects in their evaluations [30, 31]. Zink and Geyer [32] recently criticized the popular “circular economy” movement for largely ignoring rebound effects as a potential outcome of manufacturing efficiency efforts. They point out, for example, that the current market for refurbished cell phones, rather than contributing to reduced new production, has grown up alongside increased cell phone production. Their study claims that “the smartphone circular economy (how it is currently practiced) necessarily leads to rebound.” They conclude that “rebound could be a serious obstacle to creating meaningful environmental improvement.”

By focusing our eyes on the efficiencies of new gadgetry, eco-technological concepts, like renewable energy and the circular economy, may distract us from confronting norms of consumption that underlie and facilitate the persistence of environmental violence on a global scale [33]. If we are lulled into accepting ever-expanding purchases of technology-forward goods and services, we will never pull back the green curtain hiding the realities of our one, global, and interconnected economy [34]. Keeping the affluence–technology in our vision is, thus, critical for developing appropriate and effective approaches to sustainability.

7.2.3 The Affluence–Technology Connection

The affluence–technology connection is complex. No single methodology can capture the bi-directional mechanisms by which current affluence and the evolving demands of society influence technological design, and technological design influences consumption activity and evolving demands and desires. Sociological research in sustainability has been especially clear about the fact that environmental outcomes are not unidirectional. They cannot be viewed as simply the outcome of aggregated individual decisions (bottom-up), nor the collective response to economic and technical structures (top-down). According to Shove et al. [35], environmental outcomes at the global or societal scale can be seen as the result of “practices,” hybrid structures that evolve from the interplay of individual decision-makers, social norms, and available technology.

Shove and colleagues also point to the need for lower-consumption practices to develop, in order to achieve truly sustainable ways of living. Through a review of energy efficiency rebound in building technologies, Shove [36] concludes that perhaps the most robust definition of sustainable technologies would be those that “do not meet present needs, and do not deliver equivalent levels of service, but that do enable and sustain much lower-carbon ways of life.” Once planners and engineers treat this as a viable option, she argues, an entirely new scope of design for true sustainability will open up. One way to characterize this scope is what growth critic Tim Jackson has called “prosperity without growth” [37]. Meanwhile, low-carbon and prosperous lifestyles are already being enjoyed in many parts of the world, cultivated through social and technological traditions oriented away from growth and toward prosperity [38, 39].

7.3 Appropriate Technology

The industrial–capitalist–technological system is characterized by perpetual growth through excessive production, relentless marketing and public relations to expand markets and demand through consumerism [40, 41]. In the process, novel “needs” are manufactured and the boundaries and norms of comfort and convenience are continually reshaped [42, 43]. In this system, relatively few technologies are socially necessary, and their manufacture and multiplication are exacerbating ecological destruction and global social injustice. Because it is organized around the maximization of profit, this system foments an ever-accelerating throughput of matter-energy and output of waste [44]. Technological planned obsolescence begets material objects of short functional lifespan, but nearly permanent environmental harm, being made of industrial processes and novel chemicals that do not return safely to the environment (e.g., plastics, stain-proof coatings, heavy metals). Perceived obsolescence, driven by the same forces that manufacture demand for novel products, is equally responsible for overconsumption and its attendant environmental harms. While it is true that smart phones, for example, have offered unprecedented levels of interconnectivity and access to information, and many would now consider them indispensable, the only reason to sell more phones than there are users is profit. The “style cycle,” where companies change product design (often in a cyclical manner), continues to lend the appearance of novelty to its products so that consumers feel pressured to keep up to date with the latest technology. The cycle is further propelled by the resource and positional inequities; turnover is maintained through a constant struggle for “more” among consumers seeking to better their perceived position in society [45, 46].

From an equity and sustainability perspective, the reigning technological system is fundamentally inappropriate. Despite wearing the mantle of high-positivist and rationalist science, it bears all the characteristics of a giant Rube Goldberg machine, where solutions, no matter how brilliant in isolation, are applied to either ridiculous ends or a ridiculous complication of means. Each stage of the unnecessary or absurd contraption itself produces a new series of problems requiring further (profitable) technical mitigation, treatment, and externalization in turn. A modern life cycle assessment can be almost endlessly applied to most modern complicated technologies (i.e., those that are mechanized and motorized, powered by fossil fuels or electricity) and the globalized, capitalist economic system in which they circulate. Technologies under this system, being commodities, are created and organized for the purpose of generating surplus exchange value for profits, rather than use or subsistence value for needs. As Otto Ullrich points out, the vastness of this lifecycle entails an insidious seductiveness, since it disperses, mystifies, and socializes its real costs in time and space, causing a “non-intersection between advantages that are privately consumable and disadvantages that have to be borne collectively” [47]. Those disadvantages of high technology within capitalist globalization today include exploitation, “slow violence” [48], and pollution on a planetary scale, costs which are socially paid, but nevertheless, hidden from the end consumer. As K. William Kapp famously remarked, “Capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs” [49].

Fledgling efforts at true cost accounting to incorporate externalities into prices have floundered against the regime of capitalist globalization of the past few decades, where systematic worldwide cost-shifting is the sine qua non of multinational corporations’ profitability and growth. Only by way of this accounting sleight of hand can complicated high-tech devices appear “efficient” against simple manual tools. This is to the benefit of both producer and consumer, who externalize costs of environmental impacts to often-distant ecosystems and peoples they rarely have to see or think about. The consumer is, by design, naïve, which is to the advantage of the producer, who better understands the impact of their business, but manufactures and protects the blissful ignorance of the consumer to promote a narrative of ethical and sustainable consumption.

Companies could be forced to internalize these costs through regulatory means, or production could be decommodified and optimized to reduce impacts throughout the supply chain. Yet, there remain challenges, disagreements and biases around how or whether to assign monetary value to externalized costs, and economic decisions are usually better made by considering the material impacts of production and consumption, as well as first asking what the appropriate goods and services are to live well within the means of the planet, rather than through a circuitous monetized proxy and fraught attempts at cost internalization [50].

7.3.1 Principles of Appropriate Technology

Contrarily, “traditional” (defined here as land-based, peasant) cultures have been marked by “subsistence technologies” that embody a radically opposite set of values and design principles that together constitute a template for the “original appropriate technology” (AT), which finds many parallels – with modifications – in the contemporary AT movement.

These principles include, inter alia: use value over exchange value; social necessity; place-based, hand-made and low- or no-energy; non-polluting; durable, but also, ultimately safely biodegradable; democratic and decentralized; and non-alienating (Table 7.2). Perhaps most importantly, consonant with the insights of social critics ranging from William Morris to Gandhi to Ivan Illich, is the avoidance of technical interventions and superfluous innovations where none are needed, or where their utility may be overwhelmed by their harms: the sufficiency principle and the precautionary principle, respectively. These suggest a broader “a-novation” principle – the application of intelligence and creativity to not-doing, to non-production. As William Morris insisted, “nothing should be made by man’s labour that is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers” [51]. Related to this, in traditional cultures, social relations of cooperation, reciprocal labor and care often substitute for individualized and privatized technical means. In Ladakh, India, for example, villagers traditionally pool their labor to harvest and process everyone’s crops in a staggered fashion, engage in communal shepherding of livestock on a rotational basis, and distribute gravity-fed irrigation water equitably using simple spades and soil under ingenious networks of hand-dug canals and turn-taking. These forms of cooperative labor largely obviate the need for technologies in the first instance or facilitate the practicality of local AT.

Table 7.2 Ten principles of AT

1	Socially necessary; not frivolous or from marketing manipulation (artificial need); no technology where none needed
2	Place-based, locally sourced natural materials & local knowledge
3	Hand-made
4	Non-polluting (either locally/directly or distantly/indirectly), non-toxic, safe
5	Durable functional use; easily locally repairable and recyclable; constituent materials safely and completely biodegradable
6	Simplest, least complicated design for functional use
7	Operating at slow speeds (or no speed)
8	Low-energy and direct use of passive (wind, water, sun) or simple active energy (biomass, muscle power)
9	Democratic – decentralized; built, used, maintained, repaired locally; common knowledge vs. proprietary; promotes social equality, discourages hierarchy
10	Non-alienating (from our own labor, ourselves, each other, and nature), non-livelihood-destroying

7.3.2 Two Types of Appropriate Technology

Traditional/original AT, based on communal social arrangements, hand-crafted from local, natural materials that cultures have used for centuries mostly for subsistence purposes, not only points toward environmental sustainability, but, by minimizing or eliminating dispersed costs, is also structurally non-violent. One can think, for example, of the traditional water mill still in common use in villages throughout many mountainous agrarian regions: constructed of local, natural materials based on ancestral knowledge; communally owned, utilized, and repaired; running on non-polluting gravity-fed water; pollution and waste free; operating at relatively slow speeds and low temperatures; and so on. No downstream community is harmed or poisoned by the construction or operation of these water mills.

What we call modern AT (aka Intermediate Technology) comprises tools and machines that may use materials from the industrial economy (thus, occasioning some indirect pollution), but otherwise shares many characteristics with traditional AT, especially economic independence, political democracy, and social cohesion.

Suffice it to say that many modern ATs have been eagerly adopted by traditional cultures, because such technologies graft well onto and enhance the subsistence economy, while responding to novel challenges of modernity, and maintaining critical qualities like autonomy and cooperation, even if some of them necessitate entanglement with the cash economy. For example, in Ladakh, such modern ATs as solar cookers and water heaters, rocket stoves, ram pumps, trombe walls, and other passive solar building techniques are widespread. This belies misperceptions of traditional cultures as static and closed; indeed, traditional ATs themselves are the result of centuries of careful refinement and innovation [52]. Still, the chief disadvantage of both traditional AT and modern AT vis-à-vis modern high technology is precisely in their non-mystifying nature: less privatized convenience borne of cost-shifting. This lack of “convenience,” conventionally conceived, and the physical muscle input required in its use, have been the very features of traditional technology long denigrated as backward, and a pretext for colonial intervention and domination [53, 54]. This domination continues, as both traditional and modern ATs are being quickly displaced by industrial products and materials, and traditional cultures are eroded by incorporation into the extractive global economy. This is of particular concern at a time when living examples of AT and sustainable modes of social organization are so desperately needed to navigate the downscaling of industrial society. A major challenge is saving and reviving them before they disappear, for, as Illich once remarked, the great advantage of a place like rural Guatemala or India is “still being muscle-powered enough to stop short of an energy stroke” of the sort suffered by the over-developed societies [55].

The modern AT movement, intermeshed with the degrowth movement, is pursuing exactly this sort of “reverse development,” a sort of re-peasantization and deliberate inconveniencing, motivated both by ethical objections to the structural violence of high technology, and by practical ones of independence and autonomy especially from centralized energy grids and fossil fuel oligarchies. Some outstanding examples include: L’Atelier Paysan, a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings appropriate to the unique needs of small-scale agroecology, in the pursuit of “technological sovereignty” [56]; Maya Pedal in Guatemala, a social enterprise building pedal-powered non-electric bicycle machines for numerous practical household and small farm applications; and Can Decreix, a center for putting degrowth principles into practice, based on low- or no-tech living in France, among many others.

Beyond tools, movements working to rebuild community and decommodify life through projects of sharing and repairing are also pointing the way toward a “social AT”: repair cafes, remakeries, tool-lending libraries, and reskilling hubs [57]. Movements politically resisting corporate practices of “planned obsolescence” and the criminalization of repair are also important elements of the broader AT shift [58], as are those focused, not on ever more innovation, but rather, “exnovation” to dismantle harmful technologies and technological systems that are incompatible with eco-socially just futures [59].

7.3.3 Following Original Appropriate Technology

There is no AT in traditional cultures independent of traditional community-based social arrangements: reciprocal or differential labor sharing and care, mutual aid, and the like. The two are mutually constitutive. Just as sustainability cannot be achieved merely by adding renewable electricity technologies to an otherwise unchanged consumerist-industrial growth economy, neither can AT in isolation make significant impact situated within an otherwise congenitally unsustainable system. Part of the essence of AT emerges from, in, and for community life. Unsustainable substitutions are often ushered in in the wake of community disintegration, and cause further such disintegration in turn, because, by nature, they obviate the community element and privatize the use and shift allegiance/dependence to global industrial supply chains. AT is, therefore, not just a matter of tools and artifacts, but requires supportive social and political-economic conditions. For AT to thrive will require transcendence of capitalism-industrialism and the structural drivers such as massive subsidies and the global advertising industry that expand its power, and a return toward smaller-scale, more localized, non-violent sufficiency economies. AT, in turn, will be necessary to enable such economies.

As the dominant techno-industrial system drives the planet over the precipice of ecological catastrophe, and deepens social maladies of alienation (from our own labor, ourselves, other people, and nature) and injustice, the need to downscale, decentralize, and de-grow the economy becomes ever more apparent and urgent. The “original AT” of traditional cultures and its contemporary applications and modifications offer important contributions to this pressing task of subordinating the economy and its technologies to social and ecological survival.

7.4 Affluence-Limiting Technology in the Global North: The Case of Transportation and Speed

Transportation is a sector that has continually expanded its geographic, cultural, and technological reach and where differences among economies are stark. Per capita transportation distances are clearly tied to the size of the overall economy, rising in correlation with per capita GDP [60]. In the United States, this rise has continued somewhat linearly through the turn of the century, while in emerging economies such as India, it has grown exponentially [60, 61]. Here too, feedback from technology to affluence cannot be ignored. The evolution of fuel economy in US motor vehicles, charted in Figure 7.3, displays a coordination between technological efficiency, fuel use, and distance traveled, which mirrors the trend shown earlier for energy use.

Figure 7.3 US Vehicle Travel, Fuel Use, and Fuel Economy, 1960–2015

Transportation, after all, is demand for an energy service. Humans don’t demand energy directly – they demand the capabilities that available energy can provide to them. In transportation, this capability is the movement of mass (people and their things) over a distance, in a constrained period of time. In the context of the IPAT equation then, we can frame several technological parameters related to transportation.

As we consider what it will take to achieve carbon emissions reduction goals, we must consider, not only the impact-per-unit requirement (i.e., carbon intensity) of transportation, but also potential changes in the quality of modes of transportation used. Speed is a key factor that changes the nature of the technology used. Looking at transportation survey data from the United States for the period 1990 to 2017, it can be seen that the average speed of transportation is very consistent when daily travel activity is grouped by mode (Bus, Train, Car, etc., Figure 7.4). This means that “speeding up” or “slowing down” transportation as a whole is not a matter of regulating travel speeds within a given mode, rather, it is a matter of mode-switching. In turn, each mode has a different carbon intensity owing to its material and mechanical differences.

Figure 7.4 Average travel distance and speed by mode [62]

Taking these standards into account then, what range of transportation affluence (demand) and technologies (vehicle types and speeds) would be capable of meeting ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions in the US transportation sector? Consider the affluence–technology “solution space” for achieving emissions reductions that fulfill the US commitment embodied in the Paris Climate Accord, that is, to lower emissions to 70% of 2017 levels. This area is conceptualized in Figure 7.5: on the x-axis is average travel speed for the entire population, calculated based on mode share and the mode-speeds described above, and on the y-axis is average travel activity per person per year (in kilometers). Thus, each point on the graph represents an average affluence–technology (as distance-speed) scenario for the US transportation sector.

Figure 7.5 Climate action solution space, 2030 historical speed-distance (x−y) levels depicted for US, based on NHTS survey data

Furthermore, at each coordinate, we can calculate the total sector emissions in 2030, across the population and including all modes of transportation. Applying different assumptions about technology development and travel habits yields different “solution spaces.” The space depicted uses the following reasonable assumptions for sustainably and equitably achieving our Paris commitment:

Ambitious decarbonization via efficiency: the carbon intensities (gCO₂/km) of car, airplane, and transit fleets decrease to 70% of 2017 levels (the average efficiency improvement rate over the past two decades)

Increasing adoption of walk, bike, and transit modes: public transit use increases by 40% (as transportation becomes more urban and shared) and walking/biking activity increases by 50% (a key goal for sustainability advocates)

These results communicate just how little space is available to increase transportation activity and speed, while still meeting ambitious environmental goals. Transportation levels for previous survey years are given, showing that, even if Americans were to travel at distances and speeds similar to those recorded in 1990, the transportation sector would barely achieve Paris Accord goals. Furthermore, even though some goal-achieving scenarios exist at higher speeds (to the right of the heatmap), they still require a reduction in per capita travel distance.

It may sound simplistic to claim that lowering environmental impact requires a slowing of technology and a lowering of economic activity, but here we have found, through deliberate quantitative analysis, that this is most likely to be the case.² And because transportation lies at the heart of so many aspects of our modern economy, it is not a stretch to claim this as a general lesson. It is a tough lesson, especially because we are so accustomed to techno-optimism – hoping for technology alone to bring about change, without disturbing our climb to ever-greater levels of affluence.³

7.5 Sector-Based Solutions Do Not Obviate the Need for Appropriate Affluence

Next, we communicate the findings of a recent study by Horen-Greenford and colleagues entitled, “Shifting economic activity to services has limited potential to reduce global environmental impacts due to the household consumption of labor” [65]. This study has both policy implications and important lessons for the concepts of appropriate technology, levels of affluence and consumption, and appropriate notions of development. In our study, we demonstrate from a fresh perspective that the consumption levels of affluent people will likely need to decrease, even when employing more people in services. Our findings further discredit the promise of environmental “decoupling” and “green growth” – colloquially understood as the ability to grow the economy without environmental damage.

Traditionally, environmental decoupling⁴ refers to the practice of disconnecting environmental impacts (i.e., resource use or pollution) from economic activity. For example, one may say that energy production is decoupling from GHG emissions as coal power is taken offline and replaced with renewable energy. To be more precise, if global GHG emissions rise more slowly than gross world product, but still continue to rise, “relative decoupling” is occurring (i.e., there has been a partial disconnection of impacts from activity). If GHG emissions plateau or decrease as gross world product increases, “absolute decoupling” is occurring (i.e., there has been a complete disconnection of impacts from activity). Absolute decoupling is needed for green growth, since exponential increases in economic activity will still cause exponentially increasing impacts [66]. Mounting evidence suggests that technological innovation cannot be relied on to ensure the environmental sustainability of continued economic growth since environmental impacts are part and parcel of economic activity and there is little evidence for believing rates of decoupling can increase enough to allow for envisioned economic growth [67, 68]. Realizing this, a growing number of scientists and economists are highlighting the need to rein in the consumption of the global affluent [69].

Our study adds to these insights by formalizing an alternative definition of decoupling that has become prominent in sustainable development discourse. Instead of pursuing environmental decoupling through technological improvements, like efficiency gains or energy transitioning, many believe that structural changes to the economy (i.e., how the economy is composed) could yield lower impacts, while still allowing us to grow the economy. An economy that is heavily implicated in extraction is called a primary economy. The typical depiction of economic development begins with basic subsistence like agriculture, and on extracting raw materials for export, then an economy uses its increasing wealth to build up industry, thereby transitioning to a secondary economy, which is more reliant on heavy industry like manufacturing industrial (e.g., steel, textiles, semiconductors) and consumer goods (e.g., automobiles, clothing, electronic devices). Excluding their imperial and colonial legacies, this describes how rich countries envision industrialization.⁵ Finally comes the promise of a clean environment with a powerful economy, made possible by a final transition to value-dense services that are ostensibly largely immaterial. This is the last stop on the path of western economic development, referred to as “tertiarization,” or a shift to a more services-oriented economy.

This narrative is so familiar that it’s taken for granted by many in economics and international development, as well as the private and public spheres. The promise of a high-tech clean future is featured prominently in the future envisioned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and captains of the green corporate world. Advocates of environmental and social justice within civil society see well-paying jobs in public services and green infrastructure as an integral part of a transition to a more equitable and ecological society.⁶ Everyday people in the Global North have heard these stories increasingly over recent decades, as more people are desperate for solutions to our ecological and climate predicaments. The sustainable development goals (SDG) presuppose green growth via a shift to a service economy, which is central to the SDGs “decent work for all” (SDG 8) and achieving “responsible consumption and production” (SDG 12).

This theory had been previously formalized as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), which proposed that environmental impacts followed an inverted U-shape, increasing with industrialization, but plateauing and decreasing after a certain level of affluence was obtained [70]. The reasoning was analogous to the trajectory of inequality versus wealth of a nation, as originally observed by economist Simon Kuznets, that at first, a nation could not afford to be environmentally conscious (or equitable, in the original theory), but after it reached a certain level of wealth, people preferred a cleaner environment to marginal increases in wealth. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the whole story. It was true that wealthier people prefer to live in a cleaner environment, but their pollution did not disappear – much of it moved (and continues to be exported) to poorer countries along with heavy industries. Capital found cheaper labor and laxer environmental protection in the Global South, while developed countries enjoyed higher wages in service-rich economies, and the cleaner environment that came with a post-industrial society. When we look at trade flows, and account for the resources and pollution linked to consumption, most impacts have continued to increase proportionally to consumption. The empirical basis for the EKC hypothesis has now been largely disproven [68], but the idea lives on, inhabiting a host of ideas in economic development literature and policy, and in the public mind.

To answer the question of whether services are cleaner than ostensibly dirtier sectors, like food production or heavy industry, we knew that it would be necessary to consider the impacts of household consumption by those employed in these industries. It seemed suspicious that we could have a clean and lucrative economy by simply employing more people in well-paying jobs, be they public (e.g., healthcare, public administration, education) or private (e.g., software, insurance, consulting), since people employed in these services are well off and have very consumptive lifestyles, relative to most people on the planet. Naturally, we expected that if you considered what people ultimately spend their income on, and if you were to grow the economy by increasing the relative share of high-wage jobs in the services sector, you would also increase consumption and its attendant impacts.⁷

To show what would happen to environmental impacts because of increases in personal consumption following a shift to services, we attributed the impacts from household consumption of employed people to the industries that employed them. This effectively endogenizes labor as part of production. We then used input–output economics to estimate the total environmental impacts related to industrial activity when considering all the inputs that go into every industry. This approach is known as environmental “footprinting” or “consumption-based accounting,” and traces production all the way down the supply chain, without double counting inputs or impacts. See Figure 7.6 for a visual representation of our method. Figure 7.7 depicts our results where, in absolute terms, the impacts of services doubled for GHG emissions, and tripled for land use and water consumption, respectively, while GHG emissions and land use for food production were each reduced by seven times, and water consumption by a factor of 10. The profound shift observed was expected and intuitive, but astonishing in its degree.

Figure 7.6 Schematic of methodology: including (endogenizing) labor as part of economic production. Blue inputs indicate examples of labor and household consumption attributed to an industry

Figure 7.7 Results: Global impacts by sector, before and after inclusion of labor in supply chain

However, we still needed to answer the fundamental question: Are services cleaner, per unit value created, than their “dirtier” counterparts? Only then could we attempt to answer the larger question of whether a transition to a more services-oriented economy actually holds the key to green growth.

Figure 7.8 depicts our secondary results: The distributions of impacts per unit value before and after household consumption of employed people is included in industrial impacts. Notice how, in the conventional picture, that is, before including household consumption, services seem to give a much better “bang for your buck,” with much lower impacts per euro than food, which has much higher impacts per euro made, being relatively less value dense. The story fundamentally changes after adopting a more holistic perspective. Impacts of all economic sectors converge, there being no statistical difference in impact between producing a euro of food or a euro of services.⁸ Now we can account for the cascading effects of employing more people in services. We can also now begin to derive some conclusions about whether the promise of tertiarization or, more specifically, a high-tech green future, is plausible. This is where we necessarily must diverge from the data and model at hand, to some more speculative, but hopefully, well-grounded, postulates.

Figure 7.8 Results: Sectoral impact per unit value, before and after inclusion of labor in supply chain

Given the mounting evidence that green growth via technological innovation is unlikely and caution or good judgment implores us to not rely on a fantastic miracle to save us,⁹ it seems that sustainable growth is untenable by any strategy, but there is not a lack of options. There are roads less recently traveled, but just as open to us, if we choose to follow them – ones that lead to more appropriate levels of affluence and consumption. Given the previous evidence and our recent study’s findings, we’ve concluded that there is no way around constraining economic size, and that if we are to achieve the heart of the SDGs, of better lives for more people, especially those living in destitute poverty now, there will need to be a wide scale redistribution of wealth and resources. Finding the appropriate lifestyles and technologies for different regions and people should be our challenge. Whatever we (the global affluent) choose – living well with less, regardless of where we work or how wealthy we are – must be part of an environmentally sustainable and just world.

7.6 Degrowth Futures: Appropriate Affluence and Technology

Technological progress is not an autonomous process. It is constantly being reinterpreted and revaluated by the societies that interact with technology. Writing about our global environmental conundrum, researchers [71] assert that “visions of the future are key elements in the process of technological development and acceptance.” In other words, human aspirations can play a key role in directing the kind of technologies that are pursued and which ultimately prevail. Society is generally aware of the global environmental effects of human activity and yet we are still running a technological advancement program very much like the one that prevailed over a century ago. Reimagining technology in a lower-affluence framework, could be a key step in pursuing true global sustainability. This concept of appropriate affluence forms the overarching theme that ties degrowth and appropriate technology together.

The affluence–technology connection is the link that has, so far, prevented AT efforts from breaking through the global trend of increasing pollution and ecological destruction. In this section, we have simply detailed the mechanics of the affluence–technology connection in order to prove that it must be confronted within any robust sustainability framework. The degrowth framework most directly confronts issues of affluence, making it AT’s natural partner for an appropriate and sustainable future. While AT thrives in many parts of the world, it is not yet driving appropriate degrowth where it matters most – among the global affluent. In this article we have mentioned some promising initiatives, such as re-peasantization, repair cafés, and tool-lending libraries. Such efforts will grow as a necessary condition of socially just degrowth, but they will not gain traction until structural and cultural space is made for them. Degrowth’s focus on decolonizing the imaginary of what constitutes a “sustainable future” is a key connection point with the environmental violence framework [72].

Degrowth also adds a global and systemic perspective on technological progress that is essential for reimagining technological “progress.” After all, are the Wright brothers to blame for the globe-spanning impacts of the airline industry today? They started out as tinkerers of simple means in a Main Street bike shop (Figure 7.9). Their genius created a functional airplane, and the global economy took over from there. A degrowth + AT framework asks for regulations and constraints on the size of the global economy, while embracing and emphasizing human ingenuity at the community scale.

Figure 7.9 Wright Brothers Bike Shop, circa 1900 [73]

8 Epistemic and Environmental Violence in Latin American Environmental Decolonial Thought

Luis Peña

Engaging Environmental Violence

This chapter illustrates how environmental violence has deep roots in the way human–nature relations have been conceptualized, and how it can also be considered a form of epistemological violence. The conflict analyzed in Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought (LDET) (coloniality, power-knowledge inequalities, extractivism, racism, the internal geopolitics of Latin American countries) explicitly shows that violence has been associated with the purpose of changing the ecology of the territories and the way people appropriate biodiversity. The corollary of the perspective presented in this chapter is that overcoming environmental violence implies promoting ontological diversity against the homogenization of culture, knowledge, production practices, and land management. The chapter discusses four specific proposals for overcoming environmental violence: social reappropriation of nature, re-enchantment of the world, EcoSimia, and peace as restitution of the collective functions of territory. The chapter argues that environmental violence indicators should not reinforce dualisms between society and nature or treat nature as an exploitable object. Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought identifies additional indicators of environmental violence, such as the deterioration of environmental diversity and the loss of biosphere negentropic capacity. The chapter also shows that LDET emphasizes eco-territorial-ontological diversity and the potential for environmental peace. In contrast to conflict studies that view nature as a resource that motivates violence, LDET recognizes nature as a non-human participant in social controversies about peace and advocates for a more-than-human and cosmopolitical perspective. For this reason, it is argued that the future of peace research should take seriously the notion that nature is the ultimate political alliance in the construction of peace as eco-ethnic-territorial movements have long understood.

8.1 Introduction

From the LDET literature, environmental violence can be defined as the deterritorialization of life expressed as the acceleration of the entropic dynamics of the biosphere, the loss of cultural (ontological) diversity of the world, and the transformation of nature into an external and commodifiable thing. The colonization of all daily life spheres and relations with nature by economic rationality is one of the most direct sources of the deterritorialization of life [1–3].

This chapter presents the content of environmental violence as the deterritorialization of life. It begins by exposing the notion of environmental conflict and violence in LDET. It then shows four knowledge-power strategies that illustrate four emphases among decolonial thought and, at the same time, the critical dimensions to understand environmental violence sources. These emphases and dimensions are: (a) the social reappropriation of nature that emphasizes the politics of cultural difference; (b) the re-enchantment of the world, which emphasizes the politics of affect; (c) EcoSimia, a concept which emphasizes the difference-diversity of forms of production; and (d) peace as a restitution of the collective functions of territory, which emphasizes territorial difference. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implications of LDET to understand environmental violence by arguing that the ultimate political ally to stopping violence is nature.

Amid the diversity of approaches used to study environmental conflicts, discussing LDET’s environmental violence concept is relevant for several reasons. First, it articulates various political lessons and theories coming from Marxist political ecology, ecofeminism, post-developmentalism, indigenism, and theories about the biosphere dynamic [4]. Second, it is a thought that supports, and is in permanent dialogue with, the ethnic-territorial social movements that stood up against environmental violence.¹ Third, this approach has a productive tension with the region’s progressist governments because, at the same time, they consider them as allies; but they also criticize them for not completely escaping extractivism and the Western matrix of values [5–8].

8.2 Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought

Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought has been forged in the context of the identity and ethnic-territorial rights struggles of peasants, black communities, and indigenous peoples against extractivism, displacement, land usurpation, and their culture’s effacement [5, 9, 10]. At the same time, it gathers a series of intellectual traditions, among which political ecology [11, 12], ecofeminism [13], decolonial thought, and a series of theories on the complexity of the biosphere and thermodynamic processes stand out [14]. What distinguishes this thought is its understanding that environmental conflicts, biosphere degradation, and violence are closely interrelated with the suppression of cultural diversity. According to this perspective, the environmental crisis and violence are the product of both the spatial logics of capitalist accumulation (geoeconomics of capitalism) and a long history of devaluation-suppression of ecological management forms and non-Western world understandings (or the geopolitics of knowledge and coloniality of power).

The binarisms between body and mind, nature and culture, together with the construction of hierarchies of moral and aesthetic legitimacy based on narratives of race and otherization of the non-European, are some of the fundamental mechanisms with which violence and the coloniality of power operate [1, 15]. From this perspective, violence is always epistemic violence (as opposed to what other perspectives on violence?) and overcoming it implies building emancipation and epistemic justice strategies [16–18]. Boaventura de Souza Santos, in Epistemologies of the South: justice against epistemicide [19], states that epistemic violence is based on five modes of invisibilization: (a) consider a specific social group as ignorant; (b) consider a life form as residual or backward; (c) classify it as inferior; (d) devalue the relevance of a group or way of life as local or particular; and (e) consider that something has no value because it is unproductive.

Epistemic violence, argues de Souza Santos, is a waste of the experience and knowledge of many peoples of the Earth but, above all, it is the source of concrete material violence that continues to occur today. Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought has shown that the territorialization of spiritual, political, economic, and social European institutions in what is now called America has been carried out through physical violence. One theme that has attracted the attention of decolonial scholars to explore physical violence and epistemic violence relationships is that of state formation [20–25]. These works allow us to see how decolonial thought interprets violence, epistemicide, and environmental conflict relationships.

The general line of reasoning is as follows: Within states, in their colonial, republican, or global phase, there have been multiple territorialities in dispute. These have been featured mainly by European anthropocentric territoriality and the biocentric territorialities incarnated in the indigenous or communities contesting the European rationality [22, 26]. The history of the territorialities in dispute is the constant expansion of modern European institutions over the other territorialities present within the states through strategies of homogenization (of the forms of land ownership, language, memory, spirituality, forms of production, customs, bodies, social rituals, ways of understanding nature, among many others) differentially successful and with various loads of physical violence [27, 28]. Every state’s formation moment in America has implemented various forms of physical violence: territorial usurpation, population concentration, massacre, slavery, imperial ecology, whiteness, segregation, persecution, and extractivism accompanied by paramilitary and military violence. This process of territorialization of the state has been commanded by white and/or Eurocentric elites, fundamentally urban, who have not understood, nor valued, the biocentric territorialities and the ecological-cultural diversity of the territories they govern [20, 29]. They have seen the non-European Others present in the state’s territory as the “nation’s setback” [23, 30]. The state’s territorialization has always been contested by groups that see their ways of life threatened and that search to defend or restitute their traditional knowledge, production forms, and biocultural heritage [31–33]. In reaction, the elites have seen subalternized groups’ resistance as a threat to recreating the European institutions in America and, therefore, have turned their resistance into security problems that should be solved through force (military interventions, relocations, segregation, considering them an internal enemy) or by excluding them from “national history” [12, 34–36]. The institutionalization of these narratives has meant the suppression of multiple local models of nature (cultural imaginaries and forms of management of specific ecological systems) and the establishment of a nature’s predatory rationality in which it is an external thing that functions mainly as a resources storage, as a waste dump, as an obstacle for salvation, civilization, progress, development, democratization and/or globalization, depending on the ruling narrative [8, 37, 38].

Based on this argument, the environmental crisis is interpreted as the Western thought crisis that, by nature’s oblivion, has converted it into a variable for capital valorization at the expense of social equality and environmental protection. Thus, environmental violence materializes as the deterritorialization of life: loss of ecological and cultural diversity; acceleration of entropic forces by the colonization of capitalist economic rationality; and loss of sense of ecological interdependence in everyday life [2, 3].

For LDET, environmental violence is not overcome through technical measures aimed at greening the capitalist economy or development, as the narrative of sustainable development defends. The LDET also criticizes the simplistic reading of the second contradiction of capital in which the environmental crisis is addressed as the product of a general and abstract capitalist accumulation logic in which epistemic violence or coloniality are excluded from power relations [9]. Overcoming environmental violence is an epistemic and political struggle consisting of thought decolonization through two parallel actions. First, recognizing and valuing the diversity of world perspectives (ontological diversity) to moving from epistemic violence to the ecology of knowledge. The second is exploring nature’s scientific paradigms, environmentalists’ social imaginaries, and collective projects capable of deconstructing unsustainable modern rationality and mobilizing social action for the construction of a sustainable future [9, 37].

The call for knowledge decolonization has deep historical roots in critical thinking. We can mention four major precursor influences shaping this political-epistemic agenda. The first precursors are a series of political thinkers from the Global South, like José Martí [39], José Carlos Mariátegui [40], Franz Fanon [41], Paulo Freire [42], and Aimé Césaire (1955) [43] who, from the Marxist economic analysis, revealed the relationship between racism, knowledge hierarchies, and imperialism.

The second precursor influence is the set of works that has covered “local knowledge,” [44] “popular knowledge,” “people’s science,” participatory action research [45], “native sciences” [46], and “indigenous knowledge systems” [47, 48] unknown and denied by scientific institutions. These works denounced, not only the domination or subordination, but also vindicated the existence, value, and legitimacy of other knowledge systems in which nature was not deemed an exploitable resource.

The third influence is decolonial thought, a poststructuralist-inspired approach, which, since the late 1990s, began to speak specifically of the need to deconstruct modern truth regimes and introduced the term “coloniality of knowledge” [49–51]. By introducing arguments from European poststructuralist thought, the decolonial works have studied how Eurocentric ideas – from Greek philosophy to modern science – were introduced into native peoples’ life worlds through conquest, colonization, and globalization, invading their cosmogonies, imaginaries, and cultural practices. They have shown how Europe turned its local narratives into universal narratives, how Eurocentric sciences contributed to the indigenous territories’ seizure, how poverty was racialized, and how development discourses and practices have been constructed [52].

Regarding the deconstruction of modern narratives about nature, Augusto Angel Maya’s work is pioneering. From his work comes the idea that the environmental crisis is a civilizational crisis. He analyzed, in various books, the cultural myths that generated nature and culture separation and its transformation into something as a simple quantifiable and disposable natural resource in the Western thought [2, 15, 53]. In his Web of Life [54], published before Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life, Augusto Angel showed that life, in its very fabric, is complex and invites us to look back to ancient, traditional forms of conceiving and inhabiting the world.

The fourth influence that feeds the LDET are the works addressing life’s biological-ecological-thermodynamic complexity and the interdependence-unity-continuity between nature and humans. Latin American Decolonial Environmental Thought dialogue with eco-philosophical concepts developed by researchers of the dynamics of nature. Among these concepts are biosphere [55], entropy [56–58], the ecology of the mind [59], life as negative entropy or negentropy [60], Gaia Theory [61], the order out of chaos [62], the physical chemistry of biological organization [63], bioeconomy [64], deep ecology [65, 66], the web of life [67], complex thinking [68], life as the movement of matter toward the adjacent possible [69], and autopoiesis [70], among others. All these concepts advocate a non-linear and complex understanding of ecological systems and the thermodynamics of nature. These concepts are incorporated to maintain a critical realistic view of nature, that is, a perspective in which nature not only appears as something socially represented but also has thermodynamic operating laws. The political consequences of these ideas, according to LDET, is that they allow an interdisciplinary and transrational approach to solving environmental problems and to understand socio-environmental systems’ complexity without turning nature into an object to be dominated and fragmented [9].

The diversity of influences mentioned above shows that the purpose of overcoming environmental violence is an epistemological and political labor. It cannot be reduced to greening the social order but has to do with building cultural and economic alternative rationalities. We have chosen some knowledge-power strategies that exhibit particular emphasis and, simultaneously, critical dimensions to understand the sources and the solutions to environmental violence. Those strategies are the social reappropriation of nature that emphasizes the politics of cultural difference; the re-enchantment of the world, which emphasizes the politics of affect; EcoSimia, which emphasizes the difference-diversity of forms of production; and, finally, peace as restitution of the collective functions of territory, which emphasizes territorial difference. In the following section, a description is laid out for the theoretical foundations of every strategy.

8.3 The Social Reappropriation of Nature to Enact the Negentropic Power of Life

The concept of social reappropriation of nature has been employed by Enrique Leff, one of the most influential scholars of LDET, to designate the political-epistemological project of territorializing environmental rationality. The social reappropriation of nature seeks to fulfill two objectives: first, to recover the sense of interdependence erased by economic rationality and centuries of philosophies that have forgotten nature; and second, to enact the negentropic power of life.

Leff criticizes Western philosophy for leaving the environmental question out of the central philosophical questions (what are the human, being, truth, justice questions) [14]. The Western ontological regime has evaded thinking humans within nature, preventing the creation of an ethic that considers biosphere care and the entropic degradation of the planet [3]. Thus, simultaneously deconstructing what has been thought and not thought in Western philosophy, he proposes building an environmental rationality with two fundamental pillars. On the one hand, by incorporating entropy and negentropy biosphere thermodynamic-ecological imperatives in economics and recognizing that symbolic-cultural conditions mark human–nature assemblages, on the other [9].

Leff argues that the capitalist economy ignores the biosphere’s thermodynamic laws. On the one hand, it accelerates the entropic death of the planet through the Earth’s constant, increasingly hasty and expansive exploitation based on the illusory belief in unlimited economic growth. Neglecting the law of entropy in the economic process, Leff argues, inevitably leads to an environmental crisis under capitalism [9]. On the other hand, the capitalist economy, which constantly creates commodities at the expense of biodiversity, does not enact the biosphere negentropy law because its basic principle is to sustain profit and not the sustainability of life. The negentropy law explains why there are complex matter organizations. It operates as a negation of entropy; it is the thermodynamic force that has enriched life, generating the diversity of forms of matter in nature. If negentropy were not an active principle of the biosphere, there would be no more life on planet Earth [3].

Leff argues that negentropy has radical implications for ecological economics and political ecology because it is the bioeconomy foundation and permits value modes of production that enhance biosphere negentropic dynamics. The negentropy principle allows political ecology – focused on socio-environmental conflicts and the unequal distribution of ecological costs generated by nature’s destructive appropriation to substantiate an ontology of life, emancipate communities’ biocultural heritage, and construct new territories of life. Negentropy allows us to conceptualize environmental violence as destroying the biosphere’s negentropic power capacity. In contrast, reconciliation with nature will increase the sense of interdependence and engage the negentropic power of life [14].

As for the human–nature assemblages, the second element of environmental rationality, Leff begins by stating that modes of production potentiating life and the planet’s biosphere co-exist with other precipitating and accelerating entropic forces [3]. The argument replicates the biocentric and anthropocentric territorialities conflict ideas. He asserts, at the same time, that nature has laws; it is also symbolically appropriate. The expansion of techno-economic rationality has reduced symbolic-cultural diversity and nature’s meanings horizon. Therefore, the work of building an environmental rationality from a decolonial perspective is to make visible other social imaginaries outside Western thought to understand alternative forms in which the living conditions have been internalized and instituted in order to learn biocultural sustainability practices [9]. Leff notes the ethnic-territorial social movements that, in their emancipatory struggles for their “traditional” knowledge and territorial rights, have become defenders of the planet’s life and ontological refuges before prevailing economic rationality. What these social movements do, implies Leff, is enact the biosphere negentropic power.

Far from proposing cultural relativism in which every culture is different and should be tolerated, the social reappropriation of nature and environmental rationality is a project that calls for an inter-rational dialogue based on the biosphere eco-biological-thermodynamics (entropy and negentropy) laws respect. These laws must be the foundation for a new economy. The recognition of environmental social imaginaries, on its side, should be the ground for the encounter of different ways of thinking, imagining, feeling, meaning, and giving value to the things of the world. Leff insists on ontological plurality as a condition for overcoming environmental violence. He calls this inter-rational exchange the “knowledges dialogue.” It is a new political space to create a destiny of nature and humanity grounded in new meanings, “new possible truths,” to break the idea of the End of History with liberalism and the unlimited growth belief. This understanding of the world should drive the construction of a new economic paradigm based on eco-technological-cultural productivity and legitimate the emergence of new collective rights: the common rights to the common goods of humanity [14].

According to Enrique Leff, the knowledge dialogue is not just a principle of democratic inclusion added to the established social order, but it creates a politics of difference. The modern narrative, according to which Europe’s local social and environmental imaginaries are global values (Development, Progress, Democracy, Freedom, Modernization) has meant exercising multiple forms of violence, including environmental violence. The search to territorialize universal projects has not served to create a sense of interdependence; instead, it has created economic, political, and racial hierarchies. The politics of difference, Leff explains, is the recognition of diversity in the ways of being (inspired mainly by [71]) and the Right to differ over futures established as desirable (inspired by [72]). Confronted with the idea of establishing a future marked by the domination of technology and the globalization of the market, the politics of difference underlines the otherness ethics, the rights to the existence of different values and meanings assigned to nature [3, 9].

Figure 8.1 The social reappropriation of nature. Enrique Leff

Source: Own elaboration.

8.4 The Re-enchantment of Nature. Environmental Affect for Environmental Reconciliation

The re-enchantment of nature is an expression used by the philosopher Patricia Noguera. She proposes to expand the idea of environmental rationality, claiming that sensibility and feelings about the Earth’s life degradation are necessary conditions to overcome environmental violence and promote ecological reconciliation. She shares the environmental decolonial proposal of deconstructing Western social imaginaries about nature. She considers that understanding the biosphere’s thermodynamic complexity (entropy and negentropy forces) is fundamental to cultural change and claims that civilizational change begins by poetizing the relationship with nature and environmentalizing everyday language [37]. Her proposal against environmental violence is to put in dialogue the phenomenology and existentialism with the indigenous nature’s ontologies. In this sense, the world’s re-enchantment is an affective turn in environmental decolonial thought. She introduces the term methodaesthesis (the paths of feeling) to describe its perspective of environmental sensibility [73].

She argues that methodaesthesis contests the way sciences have spoken about nature. Modern scientific knowledge was framed, she asserts, in the belief that a subject (I think) observes the object (measurable thing) through mathematical operations such as induction, deduction, demonstration, and/or quantification. Thus, the value of knowledge in modernity is defined by the mathematization and suppression of feeling. The truth was reduced to this subject-object mathematical operation, and reality became the “objective,” leaving out other dimensions that compose existing and existential bodies, such as dreams, imagination, sensitivity, or feelings.

The affective turn proposed by methodaesthesis strongly emphasizes the body as a symbolic-biotic assemblage. Environmental sensibility cannot be posed with the idea of an abstract body thinking the world, but in the idea of a living body, that feels and dwells in the world. Relying on the existentialism and phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, Noguera argues that experiences are only possible thanks to a symbolic-biotic body with intentionality constituted in his/her life-world. What allows things to be constituted as they are – the horizons of meaning – is an assembly between the symbolic-biotic body present in a world-of-life. The world, in its diversity, is lived as diverse, thanks to senses, the sentient body, and intentionality put into sensitivity ([74], p. 38).

Methodaesthesis, inspired by Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology, considers that the horizons of meaning are not formed in a life-world devoid of feeling or by an abstract mind that only thinks in “logical” or “rational” terms. The life-world is not only biotic and has become symbolic since the word, the imagination, began to inhabit the planet. However, in the horizons of meaning built by the West, inhabiting the world has become the act of using it, exploiting it, a process that cannot be understood without how the sense of interdependence has been destroyed [37].

Environmental sensibility then postulates the need to change individualistic, utilitarian, and anthropocentric ethics for an Earth’s ethics, consisting of not abusing vital natural systems and extending rights to organisms and the environment. The Earth’s ethics translated into several operations of resignification of our relationship with the environment; among them are [74]:

• Use alternative metaphors and images to talk about the environment. Instead of images of nature as a machine and as fierce competition, Noguera proposes using images and expressions such as magma [75], rhizome [76], autopoiesis [70], Gaia [61], and solidarity [67] that allow us to see the Earth as an interdependent and living entity, as a home shared by many life forms and processes of life, and multiple manifestations of complexity-chaos-order.

• To environmentalize everyday language to create senses of interdependence and solidarity. Against language that speaks of competition, the imposition of the strongest, or the existence of national and regional borders, the Earth’s ethics require a language underlining that solidarity, cooperation, and interdependence also organize life. Our speech acts, and research must gradually change the meaning of the terms we use. Noguera argues that it is necessary to change, through educational processes, the terms that have a strong anti-environmental semantic load preventing knowledge environmentalization; one of these terms is “resource,” as mere objects made available to us and with only an economic value.

• Care and responsibility as the intentionality that guides the connection with nature. From the images and expressions mentioned above, it is clear that Earth’s ethics consist of taking charge of life fabric care, not abusing natural systems and acting-thinking-feeling interdependence with nature. Care is associated with affection, awareness, delicacy, caution, and a respectful relationship with nature. Care is linked to the responsibility of humankind with life [67, 77]. Care and responsibility to Earth entail defending biodiversity as a condition under life resilience, flexibility, and antifragility lies. Homogenization is creating a chain (a sequence of equal things) and resilience, flexibility, and antifragility consist of creating a rhizome network of various interdependent elements.

Figure 8.2 Re-enchantment of the World. Patricia Noguera.

Source: Own elaboration.

8.5 EcoSimia: The Revitalization of Life-Place against the EcoNOmia

EcoSimia is a term that can be divided into “Eco,” from the ancient Greek root, Oikos, that serves as the prefix of eco for ecology and economics; “Sí” that in Spanish means yes; and “Mía” in Spanish means mine. EcoSimia can be translated in three ways: “Yes, it is my ecology,” “Yes, this way of producing is mine,” or “The Ecosystem is My Responsibility.” EcoSimia mentions the existence of local production networks under ecological production premises, which simultaneously offers a diagnosis of what the capitalist economy has meant for many communities: uprooting and loss of autonomy. This term circulates essentially among indigenous communities in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia and has been widely described by the philosopher Olver Quijano in EcoSimías: Visions and practices of economic/cultural difference in contexts of multiplicity [78]. EcoSimia is political intervention in everyday language to foster a sense of interdependence.

Although colonization, the formation of mono-national states, and globalization have been a project to homogenize the forms of production, the planet is still multicultural/pluri-economic/biodiverse. This diversity is explained by the profound territorial rootedness of the peoples to their life-places, states Olver Quijano. The rootedness has allowed resisting the expansion of Western culture that, explains Quijano, is a local cosmology, morality, and epistemology converted into a global design. The European liberal economy as a science and institutionalized practice around the globe is the most evident manifestation of how a local (European) narrative and practice became almost universal, defining, channeling, disciplining, and modeling the world(s) under the exercise of a kind of economic fundamentalism [78].

This fundamentalism has resulted in the ignorance of other economic/cultural differences, accusing them of being backward, unproductive, and disintegrated because they are local. Quijano asserts that the loss of productive diversity is also the sacrifice of the world’s socio/cultural, existential, and ecological diversity and implies the annihilation of epistemological/cognitive diversity. Therefore, together with the epistemicide named by other decolonial authors, Quijano mentions the economicide, the sacrifices of other forms of economic organization, and the resulting waste of economic/socio/cultural experience. Economicide is strongly associated with environmental violence because the imposition of the capitalist mode of production and the commodification of nature is based on violent intervention such as forced displacement to take over land, relocation of communities; and persecution of resistant communities [78].

EcoSimia is a term that plays a fundamental role in promoting territorial rootedness and the responsibility to care for and harmonize nature. It is a term entangled with other discursive formations that aim to strengthen territorial roots and care for nature used for the indigenous communities. Quijano synthesizes these two terms (territorial roots and care of nature) in the expression “life-place practice.” He declares that the eco-political horizon of EcoSimia is to potentiate life-place [78].

One example of discursive formations and life-place practices are “Buen Vivir,” which is part of the millenary heritage of the Andean indigenous communities and corresponds to the Sumak Kawsay or Allí Kawsay, in Kichua; the Suma Qamaña in Aymara, and the Ñande Reko in Guaraní. Expressions that, with subtle linguistic differences, mean “clean and harmonious life,” “good and beautiful existence” [79].

These discursive formations and life-place practices like Buen Vivir, states Quijano quoting Escobar [2009: 28], questions the development based on growth and material progress as guiding goals; assumes that there is no state of “underdevelopment” to be overcome, nor one of “development” to be attained, for it refers to another philosophy of life; allows us to begin by changing anthropocentrism for biocentrism; allows us to image a “new development ethic” that subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity, and well-being; and recognizes cultural and gender differences.

Figure 8.3 EcoSImia vs EcoNomia. Olver Quijano.

Source: Own elaboration

8.6 Peace as the Restitution of the Collective Functions of the Territory

The concept of peace as the restitution of the collective functions of the territory is a conception of peace coined by the Afro-Colombian National Peace Council [80]. It was elaborated in a context of high environmental violence on the Colombian pacific cost. Since the 2017, this peace concept has become a guide for the study of peace practices-epistemologies in eco-ethnic-territorial movements like the Campesino Association of the Cimitarra River Valley, the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, and the Process of Black Communities in Colombia, and the Mapuche people in Walmapu and the Patagonian region divided between Argentina and Chile. They can be defined as eco-ethnic-territorial social movements because rootedness in their territory, the care of ecosystem networks, and the purpose of defending their ethnic identity are the cornerstones in their political projects and repertoire of actions. Since the detailed presentation of each mentioned social movement exceeds the scope of this chapter, the concept of peace that we have synthesized from comparing their peace actions-concepts is the following:²

peace is a political process that consists of (re)appropriating a geographical space to carry out an economic-cultural project of dignity and ecological sustainability that permits the protection of individual and community life against violence and war. The search for peace is territorial and ecological because the purpose of confronting violence is translated into the goal that the territory – the materially and symbolically appropriated space of life – fulfills the collective functions that it has lost because of the armed conflict. [81]

When eco-ethnic-territorial social movements refer to the restoration of the territory’s collective functions, they affirm that the territory should be a space for sustainable production to affirm identity, rootedness, mobility, encounter, food and community sovereignty, enjoyment, and spirituality. Environmental violence (lack of access to land, mass murder, ecological devastation, forced displacement, extractivism, the militarization of life, and the lack of cultural recognition) is the primary source of the destruction of the territory’s collective functions.

In order to rebuild the collective functions of the territory and hinder environmental violence, the communities mobilize two interconnected resources that can be described as the moral imagination and the geographical imagination. In turn, the materialization of these resources drives the building of a territorial project. We describe these three elements: moral imagination, geographical imagination, and territorial project.

Figure 8.4 Peace as restitution of the collective functions of the territory. Luis Peña.

Source: Own elaboration

The moral imagination³ comprises conceptions and practices related to what gives harmony to the body-community-territory relationship; what makes the unity of the community possible, what needs to be repaired and how to repair it; how to deal with the enemy; and what are the heroic referents of the community’s political process and how the communities narrate their strengths. These elements are not the same as those proposed by Lederach in The Moral Imagination [82]. The issue of what harmonizes body-territory-nature relations is essential in the moral imagination among eco-ethnic-territorial social movements because much of their rootedness and environmental practices are grounded in how they understand this relationship. The body-territory-nature relations harmonization, that we can call energetic peace by following Dietrich’s terminology [83], marks the notions of justice, security, reparation, and recognition among eco-ethnic-territorial social movements.

For example, among Nasa indigenous in Colombia, the production practices aim to harmonize and revitalize nature by observing the nature mandates and the Origin Law to reconcile the life-cosmos-human unity. Harmonizing is living by respecting that mandate, while revitalization is living by taking care of nature’s mandate: protecting water and covering (wrapping up) the mountains. In Nasa language, cultivate, care, and cover or wrap with a blanket use the same term [84].

The Moral Imagination is expressed in a series of slogans and mottos that synthesize dreams, a vision of what constitutes conflict and violence, and provides the foundation for repairing the damage they caused. These slogans are axioms that have a performative character because, by representing reality in a particular way, they motivate the actions and sustain the mobilization to rebuild the collective functions of the territory. The slogans are actional and philosophical manifestos to build peace. In Table 8.1 are some slogans of the ethic-territorial social movements.

Table 8.1 Slogans of the ethic-territorial social movements

The indigenous Nasa (people from water)

From the Mapuches

– Peace is the cultural revitalization and the harmonization of life. – By recovering the land, we recover everything. – We do not struggle only for a piece of land. We are struggling to protect the Earth. – The land, for who takes care of it. – Thinking, looking, and living from the heart of the Earth. – To resist is to deglobalize the stomach. – To cultivate is weaving pieces of mountains with plants. – To cultivate is to recreate the garden of the ancestors. – Weaving life in peace is not taking more than necessary and giving thanks.

– Peace is the desirable relationship with all living things. – We give us our proper order by hearing the language of the Earth. – Our first political alliance is with nature. – We are defending paradise. – The territory is the place where we dream. – Territorial autonomy is practiced, not just asked for. – We are re–emerging. – We are disentangling the story. – Little by little, we are being. – Let’s be one again. – Good nutrition is freedom and revolution. – For land. Against capital. MAP. – We could not expel them, but they could not conquer us. – No means no.

Source: Own elaboration

All these slogans express a deep philosophical construction, activated and renewed in the realization of the political project of the communities; they show an identity construction beyond victimization. In effect, the slogans assert an economic-ecological-cultural project and inform the principles of action to build it.

The second resource that ethic-territorial social movements mobilize to promote a territory’s collective functions restitution is the geographical imagination.⁴ It is characterized by a series of actions intended to transform the social space and ecological relations created by environmental violence, that in practical terms, translates into four questions-actions [94]:

1. 1. What should the economic landscape look like? A common demand among ethnic-territorial organizations is to restore a diverse and heterogeneous landscape that extractivism, monoculture, extensive cattle ranching, and megaprojects have destroyed. For the social movements, the capital landscape is the expression of the violent imposition of a monoculture. Monoculture (mono-plantations) is monoculture, declares the Nasa community in Colombia. To name the impacts caused by extensive cattle ranching, forestry, and mining, the Mapuche use the term Az ngelay to communicate the idea of acting against the Az Mapu mandate. It is also associated with a situation in which there is no beauty and there is no order in the landscape [95]. The Nasa community asserts that their mission is to rebuild the ancestors’ garden and weave the Earth, expressed in the idea that their economic activities seek to protect the Earth by tucking it with a diverse garden of plants, animals, and people.

2. 2. What should be the relationship of the community with the non-human world? This question of the geographical imagination among the ethnic-territorial organizations refers to one of the most important axes of action and conceptualization. It has to do with a series of questions with regard to naming the non-human (nature? resources? forces? family?). How to interact with plants, animals, rivers, lakes, seas, forests, and mountains? How much to take from them? The way the communities solve these questions expresses how all present things in the world are classified, including people (morphological similarity, analogies, testable features, properties, uses, contiguity) [96] and how to connect with them (protection, use, and reciprocity). In indigenous communities’ worldviews notions of the biosphere unity, the vitality of non-human things in the cosmos, or the codependency between the actions of the human and the non-human prevail. Those notions define their political projects [97, 98]. For the Nasa in Colombia and the Mapuche in Argentina and Chile, humans are members of a cosmic-geological-biological family [99–101]; its inseparability defines the life plan and the correct way of acting before all life forms. Among them, a person’s role is to promote the best coexistence and reconciliation between all the family members forming the world – Itxofill Mongen.

3. 3. Within the geographic imagination, ethnic-social organizations pose the question of what should be the rhythms and forms of daily appropriation of space and time. For them, overcoming environmental violence and promoting the idea that territory fulfills collective functions implies recovering the traditional rhythms that defined their place-time experience. Through time-place practices restitution, they aim to reconcile the quotidian with the purpose of cultural revitalization and harmonization with non-humans. In practical terms, it translates into how to organize daily activities for social rituals. Against the atomized time of mechanical activities for the other’s benefit (owner of a plantation, a mining company, a factory) proposed by the capitalist economy, the communities oppose the idea of activities with duration, with meaning for the community, and to revitalize nature. Indigenous daily life is full of rituals (getting up to greet the sun, being thankful for its presence, cooking, eating and undertaking activities together) that have the sense of creating health and well-being and social-ecological links [97, 100, 102].

4. 4. Within eco-ethnic-territorial movements’ geographical imagination, the territory’s concept is essential to constructing peace. It is mentioned as delimited-appropriated-political space, interacting with the state’s jurisdictional order, and a symbolic life space in which the community’s practices and identity are grounded. As a political space, the eco-ethnic-territorial movements construct a narrative about what territory the community has used and appropriated and for what purpose. This territorial narrative is full of mentions of places with specific meaning, borders, landmarks, spatial classification, and distribution of activities. This narrative derives mostly from contesting existing state political borders. The Mapuche organizations question, for example, the borders imposed violently by Chile and Argentina over their original Wallmapu territory ([104] Schiaffini, 2019; Waks, 2018; Zapata, 2015). The indigenous and the Afro-Colombian social movements contest the political jurisdictional order by demanding autonomy and respect for ancestral territories.

   As a symbolic and life space, territory is composed of physical biodiversity, a network of places for social and spiritual rituals, and a space from which cultural symbols come. The term territory is usually associated with life, with a home, a house, a protective home, and a home to be protected. It is also comprised of a spiritual, sacred, and energetic geography. The territory is a symbolic and life space bond philosophy (local ontology) and identity. The lonko (spiritual and political leader among Mapuche people) Mauro Millán explains:

The territory is the backbone for the Mapuche and defines us as a nation. The territory and all its energy inspire the philosophical thought of our Mapuche people. Without the territory, they condemn us to disappear. It is not a physical disappearance but rather the withdrawal of our philosophical principles. Civilization has erased the diversity of ways of thinking. The world has lost its wealth of thought. The ideology of death has been imposed, where man is above nature. The territory is not a property. It is the possibility of a thought.

(“Radio interview with [103]”)

Finally, the definition of peace as the restitution of a territory’s collective functions translates into a territorial project, that is, the purpose of materializing justice, life revitalization, and economic and cultural autonomy through the transformation of the existing territorial order. The territorial project politicizes the issues of land, autonomy, visions of development, the territorial form of the state, the economic project, planning, and spatial ordering, inter-ethnic relations, and organizational strategies to vindicate territorial demands. In Colombia, the peasant reserve zones, indigenous communities, and collective territories of the black communities are examples of these communities’ territorial projects that seek to overcome environmental violence. In the case of Mapuche, there are multiple scales in the territorial project that range from actions aimed at staying in a territory, removing statues, revaluing specific places, and, of course, the recovery of productive lands through the reconstruction of some territorial-ecological-family institutions like the Lofche [104].

8.7 Conclusion: Nature Is the Ultimate Political Ally against Violence

We can draw four conclusions from what has been stated here.

• First, overcoming environmental violence implies putting in place a series of policies of difference. We have shown that in Latin American Environmental Decolonial Thought, overcoming environmental violence is an epistemic and political struggle to potentiate the biosphere and the sense of interdependence. Preventing environmental violence involves promoting biodiversity and ontological diversity – the diversity of ways of understanding, feeling, and relating to nature – as a requirement to change economic production and power relations detrimental to life sustainability. We analyze four strategies of environmental knowledge-power in order to show that there are several dimensions in overcoming environmental violence: the social reappropriation of nature; the re-enchantment of the world; EcoSimia; and peace as restitution of the collective functions of territory. These showed us that environmental violence is expressed as political and cultural homogenization, as homogenization of the type of legitimate knowledge to talk about nature, as homogenization of production practices, and as territorial homogenization. The four knowledge-power strategies against homogenization are a series of interdependent (environmental) policies of difference: cultural difference, ontological difference, economic difference, and territorial difference.

• Second, the (environmental) policies of difference show that we must address the environmental violence indicators issue. The indicators –mostly climate-centered – are relevant to show the effects of more profound problems of civilization. But they are not the definition of what environmental violence is. The discussion of the indicators is fundamental because they are what “makes us see” the problem, how to name it, and what kind of consequences we observe. Are pollution and its impact on human health [105], or the violence generated by the scarcity of “resources” or by the exploitation of them [106] sufficient to talk about and to see the environmental violence? From LDET, there are many other harms and indicators of environmental violence, such as the deterioration of environmental diversity, acceleration of entropy, biosphere negentropic capacity loss, and the deterritorialization of life. The LDET warns, also, that it is essential not to use terms, expressions, or measures that reinforce the dualisms between society and nature or to refer to nature as an exploitable object when we build indicators.

• Third, while LEDT is a critical theory, it is not a pessimistic perspective in the sense that it insists on the existence of eco-territorial-ontological diversity. The authors we have reviewed show that there are still territories, capacities, production forms, and ways of understanding nature that have not been erased and that constitute a network of spaces of hope. Additionally, incorporating the idea that the thermodynamics of the planet are also driven by negentropic power and that there are peoples who potentiate negentropic power of the biosphere makes LEDT essentially a critical and optimistic thought that environmental peace is possible.

• Fourth, in contrast to peace and conflict studies, in which nature is, above all, a resource that motivates violence [107], from the LEDT we see that nature is the ultimate political ally in preventing violence and building peace. In peace and conflict studies, the theme of political alliances that define armed confrontations or the search for peace and reconciliation is also recurrent. Peace is often defined as rebuilding the center of a social network broken by violence [82] or finding a resilient allied group capable of containing attacks against reconciliation [108]. The definition of these alliances, or the search for the network’s center, only has as a reference to human political actors. However, LDET, which has studied ethnic-territorial movements, understands that at the center of the network of a destroyed social space there are also non-human participants: a river, a sacred space, and a specific ecosystem, for example. This is clearly expressed by the Mapuche poet Jorge Espindola, who maintains that the most important political alliance in the construction of peace is nature, that is, that in the Mapuche’s struggle against extractivism and to promote territorial rootedness, the memory of biocultural practices and the responsibility to take care of nature is always present.

To understand the idea that the first political alliance is nature, it is not necessary to consider nature as a person or attribute subjectivity to nature’s elements. Instead, it is about understanding that nature is an actant, a non-human participant in social controversies about peacebuilding. Bruno Latour [109–111], Isabelle Stengers [112], Graham Harman [113], and John Law [113] among other authors of Actor-Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Critical Realism, have shown, that in social controversies, there are always objects or mega objects (plants, animals, ecosystems, gases, minerals, apparatus, the Earth), not as accessories, but as fundamental non-human participants without which political disputes would not exist. This perspective, largely unknown by LDET, implies, as Stenger says, the introduction of a new notion of cosmopolitics, not in the Kantian sense, but in the sense that in politics, there are, not only humans, but also actants (things, objects, mega objects) participating [114]. They participate because they are named, used, and defended by social actors. Thinking about environmental violence from a more-than-human and cosmopolitical perspective in terms of critical realist ontologies seems to be one of the issues that will have great relevance in the coming years, given the growing mix of peace and environmental action agendas, as the eco-ethnic-territorial movements have long demanded.

9 A Degrowth Perspective on Environmental Violence

Mariam Abazeri , John Mulrow , Shantanu Pai , and Max Ajl

Engaging Environmental Violence

We propose that researchers of environmental violence (EV) have much to gain by considering the relevance of degrowth critiques in characterizing and addressing EV. We argue that a more dynamic, intersectional, and less anthropocentric definition of EV reveals how pervasive forms of violence against the biosphere are still embedded in many contemporary strategies for sustainability. Recognizing these limits, as well as its overlaps with degrowth, can help us better identify assumptions and practices that address EV’s sources and far-reaching consequences.

9.1 Introduction

The concept of EV brings into focus the human activities and processes that harm people. The term “violence” is abrupt. In its provocation, it centers the negative social and environmental costs of pollutants, destabilizing an ethically impartial reading of the consequences of human-produced pollution.

The concept of degrowth takes a similar confrontational approach. As a multivalent term, it is simultaneously a critique of present conditions and a vision of the future. Degrowth is not only a research paradigm, but a political project. In short, it calls for wealthy economies to abandon the goal of increasing gross domestic product; scale down material production to reduce extraction and energy use; and center economic activity around improving human well-being. Unlike recession, degrowth is a deliberate strategy to enable decarbonization and prevent further ecological breakdown, as well as to improve social outcomes.

Within the call for a smaller economy lies an implied ability to transform and reduce material lifecycles toward a way of life that is ecologically sustainable, as well as one that is socially equitable. What kinds of actions are needed to pursue a just and democratic transition that makes lives far less precarious and environmentally degrading? In this chapter, we introduce the degrowth movement – its history, tenets, and current activities – and identify important overlaps with the EV concept. In doing so, we also emphasize the importance of decolonizing contemporary frameworks for addressing/reversing environmental pollution and degradation, drawing on observations of the appropriate technology movement in the Arab world and rural women’s collective governing strategies in Iran. From these, we suggest adjustments to the EV framework, so that it may point away from expansionist, hierarchical, and alienating human activities and systems. These adjustments center on the need to challenge assumptions about global ecological, economic, and political systems.

9.2 What Is Degrowth?

Degrowth is an umbrella term describing various movements and strategies advocating for a more ecologically sustainable way of life by strengthening social well-being and self-determination and by redesigning social institutions to not depend on continuous economic growth [1]. In challenging the hegemony of growth and centering social justice, degrowth deliberately conflicts with policies and frameworks commonly proposed as part of the sustainability agenda, such as green growth; triple-bottom line accounting; eco-modernism; efficiency; and productivism [2–4], investigating alternative pathways to these models. Here, we summarize the history, practices, and political progress related to degrowth, as well as its conflicts with many common sustainability narratives. Addressing EV on a global scale will require that such conflicts be reconciled.

9.2.1 Degrowth History

Degrowth builds on well-established concepts and critiques across disciplines, cultures, and lifestyles. Indigenous and community-based ontologies around the world help inform an extensive body of knowledge about cultivating “economies of happiness and the ideal of frugality” [5], that is, the ability to thrive as a society, while respecting biophysical limits. Critics of industrialization, like Friedrich Engels, the Luddites, and John Stuart Mill; of consumerism, like Simone Weil and Laura Conti; and of development, like Arturo Escobar, Ivan Illich, and Majid Rahnema, have articulated various aspects of degrowth ideas in their own fields of work, challenging economic growth beyond ecological debates to include topics, like political economy, democracy, social movements, technology, and well-being.

The term décroissance, translated into English as “degrowth,” was first popularized as a term encompassing economic and environmental critiques of the pursuit of capital accumulation. Romanian-American economist and mathematician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was particularly influential in early degrowth discussion, integrating thermodynamics into economic theory in his own critique of growth [6]. Since the early 2000s, degrowth, a purposely disruptive term, has gained currency as a political project that opens conversation around systemic alternatives to a hegemony of “the growth paradigm” [7, 8] and development through capital accumulation.

In a review of over 157 peer-reviewed articles, Cosme et al. [9] identified three broad goals presented by the degrowth movement: “(1) reduce the environmental impact of human activities; (2) redistribute income and wealth both within and between countries; and (3) promote the transition from a materialistic to a convivial and participatory society.” In increasing order, these goals point to fundamental challenges to the ways in which sustainability is popularly discussed and strategized.

9.2.2 Degrowth, Green Growth, and Sustainable Development

By confronting economic growth head-on, degrowth conflicts with several dominant concepts of sustainability discourse. Here, we trace some of these notions and their differences with degrowth. Sandberg et al. [10] find “green growth” to be an overarching theme of sustainability efforts worldwide. It is “the most widely accepted solution to stop the degradation of the natural environment,” and is defined by a reliance on “technological and market innovations to improve the efficiency of production and thus, decouple the use of natural resources and environmental impacts from continued economic growth.” By this definition, green growth has become the latest term for efficiency-based emissions-reduction strategies proposed by climate activists since the 1990s.

Consider, for example, the techno-proposals of Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and energy adviser to major firms and governments around the world on efficiency and sustainability strategies. Throughout his body of work, Lovins argues for emissions reductions through an increase in product-level efficiency. In “Hypercars: The Next Industrial Revolution,” he details how design changes, material choices, and energy management techniques – essentially aerodynamics, lightweighting, and electric drive – can greatly improve the fuel efficiency of personal vehicles. He argues that, by improving energy efficiency and moving toward electrification, hypercars can address “the one-third of CO₂ emissions from transportation and the further one-third from power-stations” [11]. While this claim has since been debunked by others – electrification has been shown to have driven increases in residential and industrial energy demand during the twentieth century [12] and vehicle efficiency improvements have reinforced both the speed-up and scale-up of personal vehicle usage [13–15] – it is still widely discussed in isolation as an adaptive measure to achieve large-scale emissions reductions.

Hypercar logic has remained the centerpiece of corporate and government sustainability strategies, which often promise “triple-bottom line” win-win-wins: economic growth, happier people, and less environmental impact, that is, profit, people, and planet [16]. While efforts to increase efficiency and use renewable energy and resources can seemingly soften the ecological impact of economic growth, the social metabolism of capital accumulation requires linear, non-circular flows of energy and material, making the biophysical consequences of economic growth inescapable. This means that, regardless of efficiency, energy and matter must be increasingly extracted, transformed, consumed, and discarded in an unceasing effort to reduce costs, maximize profits, and expand outputs while averting overproduction [1]. The social and ecological consequences of such a process include, among others, the inevitable depletion of natural resources and pollution of ecosystems; the displacement, endangerment, and exploitation of marginalized social groups; and the privatization and corporate control of land and water resources at an increasingly consequential rate [17]. Curbing the unending array of new activities, needs, and material-intensive cultural norms and values that production at this scale offers, even with enhanced efficiency, requires confronting the assumptions and redesigning the processes built around infinite capital growth [18, 19].

Degrowth opens an intellectual and political conversation for questioning the logic of other accepted tenets of sustainability, in addition to efficiency, including economic decoupling [20], renewable energy [21], and nature conservation [22, 23]. Furthermore, by relaxing the focus on technology, it gives light to the connection between growth and long-standing critiques of political, economic, and cultural colonial legacies. In the words of former Iranian diplomat Majid Rahnema: “[Our] concern … is not for ‘progress,’ ‘productivity,’ or any other achievement per se in the scientific, technological or economic fields. It is rather to find out whom these serve or exclude, and how they affect the human condition and the relational fabric of the society into which they are introduced” [24].

Such questions are indeed raised within the degrowth literature, which challenges the global equity implications of development frameworks, such as previous International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate mitigation scenarios and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the former, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and ecological economist Aljoša Slameršak [25] found that IPCC mitigation scenarios aimed at keeping warming below 1.5°C or 2°C do little to remedy current energy access inequalities. On average, the 172 scenarios they analyzed “maintain the Global North’s energy privilege at a per capita level 2–3 times higher than in the Global South.” Hickel has also contrasted the realities of global inequality with the rhetoric and framing of the SDGs, particularly the SDG Index, which assigns each country an aggregate score based on progress toward the SDGs. According to Hickel’s analysis, “all of the top-ranked countries in the SDG Index have significantly overshot their fair share of planetary boundaries, in consumption-based terms,” [26] highlighting how different principles are applied for different countries in international development and environmental governance arenas.

9.3 The Limitations of Environmental Violence

In this section, we open a critical space to consider the interrelated goals of degrowth and the call to re-examine and address EV. The question of what EV is, however, raises several important issues on how we think about these goals and how they characterize the shared concern of violence on the biosphere. The editors of this anthology define EV as “direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to toxic and non-toxic pollutants put into a local – and concurrently the global – ecosystem through human activities and processes” [27]. Before we consider the overlaps between EV and degrowth, we first challenge a definition of EV that is limited to human-induced pollution and its consequences on human health.

While the ability to measure and better assess the effects of toxic and non-toxic pollutants is an important factor in improving living conditions, researchers risk sidelining and erasing the actions and consequences of other critical forms of harm on the biosphere by solely focusing on human exposure to pollution. For example, the extinction of species and destruction of ecosystems and habitats, the forced displacement of human and non-human communities, the privatization of common resources, and the elimination of environmentally sustainable resource extraction and governance practices challenge a definition of violence that is only based on pollutant exposure. Yet, accounting for these forms of violence is important, not only to better capture the extent of destruction occurring because of human practices, but also to understand the interrelated effects of these events on the biosphere. For example, while the extinction of certain species may not directly or immediately affect human communities, a cascade effect, a series of secondary extinctions triggered by the extinction of a key species, can compromise an entire ecosystem and the dependencies humans have to it – without necessarily resulting in higher pollutant exposure. Recognizing other forms of human-induced harm on the environment can help us better consider the extent of violence occurring through certain human activities and processes as well as destabilize an anthropocentric perspective of well-being that isolates humans as the subject of harm from the ecological entanglements within which we are situated.

Another limitation involves indexing pollution as a single indicator of violence, isolated from other social factors that exacerbate the harmful effects of human activities onto marginalized populations. For example, while air pollution may be high in a specific area, different social variables, from access to healthcare and public transport to affluence, can affect the extent of harm to residents and the strategies decision-makers take to address it. This is seen across American suburban spaces, where predominately white middle- to upper-class residents advocate for further social segregation under a guise of well-being and security, creating exclusive and privatized spaces, or an “inverted quarantine,” that depend on a not-in-my-backyard politic, furthering infrastructure and amenity inequalities [28–30]. A multidimensional approach that uses a range of indicators, from monetary poverty to access to basic infrastructure services, for example, can better capture the scale of violence at different social intersections and point toward more suitable measures that address these inequalities. Otherwise, a single analytical approach can overlook the compounding effects of harmful human activities on the most vulnerable people and risk perpetuating economic and social practices that exploit people and environments upheld under a banner of environmentalism and safety [28].

9.4 Addressing Environmental Violence through Local Praxis of Degrowth

Understanding the direct and indirect relationships between industrialized market growth and the exploitation and destruction of certain people, resources, and ecosystems is critical in a degrowth approach. These relationships continue to reproduce themselves in the material and economic conditions within and between the Global North and South, as well as in the political norms and social practices that maintain these hierarchical and marginalizing dynamics. To degrow means to also challenge the hegemony of a way of life that is largely based on hierarchical and subjugating relationships within social and ecological systems. This means recognizing and rectifying the ongoing violence of practices and systems that prioritize capital accumulation benefiting a limited few over environmental sustainability and the well-being of many.

We further describe alternatives to this growth-based understanding through case studies in the Arab world and in Iran. Max Ajl’s documentation of the rise and fall of appropriate technology in the agricultural sector of North Africa speaks to the promise of peasant ingenuity for sustainability, as well as its struggle against global development norms. And Mariam Abazeri’s work with a women’s artisan cooperative in Iran demonstrates opportunities for pursuing degrowth through a decolonial feminist praxis.

9.4.1 Development and Technological Pathways: Arab World Critiques

The Arab interest in appropriate technology emerged in a multi-layered context: first, the manifest failures of technology transfer to deliver development, as distinct from high growth rates, during the 1970s, as export-oriented development meant a shift to increasing industrialization and adoption of Western consumption patterns; second, the increasing diffusion of knowledge in the Arab world about positive aspects of the Chinese development experience [31, 32]; third, greater awareness of French and US technology criticism, such as the work of Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Andre Gorz, and Pierre Judet; fourth, a melding of Chinese thinking about technological self-reliance with a sharpened awareness of how much China had leaned on so-called “traditional” technology in its own endogenous agricultural development [33, 34]; fifth, an Arab iteration of the “return to the peasant,” an epistemological phenomenon which was then occurring worldwide, as ethno-botanists, agronomists, anthropologists and agronomists turned to the long-standing practices of peasants as potential maps for rural development [35]; and sixth, a rising interest within the Arab region, certainly drawing on China, but likely inspired by the Arusha Declaration in Tanzania and spreading through European heterodox development circles, that self-reliance, as distinct from autarky, could offer a different path toward a better future [36, 37].

Within this context, several overlapping and intermingling tendencies took shape, above all in North Africa, including Egypt. The guiding framework was that technology should be braided into broader economic programs aimed at self-reliance. Overall, there was a rising embrace of the need to adopt and adapt “traditional” technologies, whether artisanal handcrafts, agriculture, or housing [38]. It was widely understood that they were the basis for existing lifeways for the great majority of the population, and they were also adapted to the ecological-physical context of North Africa. They used and transformed local materials and reflected the accreted experience of uncounted generations of humans living and making their lives and developing technologies suitable to given biomes, with their extremes of heat, cold, and humidity [39, 40]. Furthermore, from an early point, they developed this into an epistemological rupture with the specific kinds of technology in the Western developmental toolkit, being aware that a different development required a different kind of knowledge, one which builds from existing strengths [41].

Within the agricultural sector, an embrace of traditional technologies brought with it an intense interest in existing forms of agriculture, not as antiquarian remnants, nor as exotic curios, but as a direct reflection of the deep knowledge of those who, for so long, had been the basis of economic life within the Maghreb arena – the peasantry. This meant extolling local landraces and rustic animals, including camels [42]. It also took the form of an engagement with existing technologies to gather water, the main limiting factor in semi-arid agriculture. In North Africa, this facet of appropriate agronomic technology took on a particularly urgent edge and became especially alluring as a technical path to popular development because of the tremendous quantities of money the state had spent on massive and massively inefficient dams: up to 50% of the state agricultural budget in some years [43]. In lieu of this “technostructure,” agronomists and rural sociologists like Slaheddine el-Amami in Tunisia and Paul Pascon in Morocco proposed different technological paths in the irrigation sector, based on matching up unemployed labor with abundant physical materials like earth and stone, and reproducible inputs of production like human knowledge and ingenuity, in order to build a dazzling variety of artisanal water-collection technologies, bolstered by modern scientific investigation and experimentation but based on building up from existing technological bequests [44, 45]. Such investigation was carried out in the context of discussions with economists, planners, builders, and engineers: a rainbow of expertise arcing into the future, and seeking out an entirely new kind of destination, asking “which technologies” for “which development?” [46]

Such technology also developed in the context of a quiet resurrection or renaissance of traditional or vernacular building styles, emphasizing that, vis-à-vis architectural style and materials use, such buildings made far more sense than the modern housing stock cropping up in metropolises like Cairo and Tunis or smaller regional cities. In their stead, in Tunisia, but most notably in Egypt, architects like Hassan Fathy proposed “building with the people,” using participatory construction methods to literally build up a new society [47]. In this way, across the entire spectrum of human works, the Arab region had its own efflorescence of interest in alternative and appropriate technologies, blooming at the same time as the movement flourished in the North and withering for not-unrelated reasons. The work from that period, in the Francophone and Arabophone spheres, constitutes a central archive for development planning and visionary futures, not merely as the crushed dreams of yesterday, but furthermore, for the plans for tomorrow.

What pathways lie ahead for addressing the structural, cultural, and technological aspects of EV? The rise and fall of appropriate technology in the Arab experience highlights the pitfalls of addressing EV through a colonial or capitalist lens, and through common “development” mechanisms. These approaches tend to be anti-participative and can be blind to homegrown innovation. If appropriate technology is a potential solution to the spread of EV, then it must be paired with a reimagining and restructuring of power dynamics found throughout the design, application, and governance of these interventions.

9.4.2 Organizing Labor and Democratizing Resource Governance in Kerman, Iran

In a rural district in Southern Iran, a group of young women are at the forefront of reshaping livelihood and governance practices in their community by challenging and renegotiating labor conditions for many local women, as well as renovating traditional water management practices and infrastructure. Motivated by both social and environmental frustrations, the group has organized interventions with the help of community facilitators to improve the wages of needleworkers, all of whom are women, and exercise more collective authority over groundwater governance. Stemming from what originally began as a filmmaking project, the women have used participatory methods to highlight how local customary and environmentally sustainable practices and institutions can be reformed to better reflect participants’ material and social needs [48].

As their first intervention, the group recruited and organized needleworkers into a cooperative to collectively manage the production and sale of their products, undermining brokers’ control of wages and access to local markets. To do this, the women had to both convince other artisans to break relations with their agents, as well as challenge patriarchal conventions that disapproved of their organizing work along local gender norms. While developing the cooperative, the group also hosted training workshops for other residents, consulted with experienced handcrafters on sale and distribution needs, and participated in artisan fairs. The group also decided to create a communal fund from a percentage of needlework profits that they would then apply to addressing another local priority – groundwater extraction and allocation.

Agriculture is one of the main sources of income in this region. After the restructuring of agrarian society in the 1960s, farmers have struggled to manage a diminishing water supply in the face of climatic changes, centralized governance practices, increasing demand, and financial strain. Some of these concerns have been exacerbated by the ongoing deterioration of communal water channels and a rise in the privatization of groundwater resources. The cooperative decided to intervene by investing in the restoration and maintenance of traditional water infrastructure known as a qanat. A qanat is a hydrosocial system of water extraction and allocation that has been historically pivotal in the cultivation, organization, and sociality of this arid region [49–51]. In this system, water is sourced from aquifers and transported underground via gently sloping channels to nearby villages [52]. Although they extract water sustainably and uphold a cooperative system of water allocation, qanats have been gradually replaced by modern extractive methods, such as semi-deep and deep pumped wells that, while depleting and compromising the quality and allocation of groundwater, require less maintenance and offer residents a private supply [53]. The group decided to work on improving the qanat system over constructing more pumped wells to increase the sustainability of water extraction practices, highlight historic hydrosocial relations, strengthen collective governance, and integrate more women into decision-making structures. Their efforts have resulted in the creation of an extensive network of organized artisans and in women’s direct involvement in local groundwater governance.

These interventions offer an example of a community-based, labor-empowering, and feminist approach of development that sustains degrowth principles [54]. By organizing artisans to further their rights and interests and integrating the cooperative into a historically collective water governance system, the women challenge gender norms and practices, address multiple livelihood concerns, and attempt to mitigate environmental challenges in their district. Prioritizing collective social infrastructure like an artisan cooperative, a communal fund, and the qanat system also enables other residents to participate in the governance of their community and resist dominant approaches of development based on hierarchical and exploitative relationships between people and their environments [55]. Instead, the group works within local narratives and institutions that reinforce a common sense of belonging, investing in the community’s infrastructure while reforming it to further embed participative, collective, and environmentally sustainable relations in everyday life.

The practices outlined above are a few examples of people proposing alternatives that reinforce local technological ingenuity and horizontal interactions based on reciprocity, democracy, and collaboration. Together, they offer a localized antidote to the ways EV is mediated through hierarchical and exploitative socioecological relations. A decolonial feminist approach to degrowth examines how hierarchies of power along patriarchal, racialized, classed, and imperial structures help constitute contemporary political and economic systems, from the local to the global, creating and perpetuating multiple forms of EV. Such an approach calls for alternatives that dismantle these hierarchical and exploitative relations to create pathways toward more sustainable and equitable social arrangements.

9.5 Confronting Environmental Violence, Challenging Assumptions

The environmental violence concept brings forth the interconnectedness of global society and the multi-faceted threats that humans face from environmental harm. However, without challenging the exploitative and expansionist imaginary that perpetuates a framework of capital growth, our assumptions of and responses to EV will fall short of better characterizing, quantifying, and addressing the consequences of this model and its activities. In the modified EV diagram, we have included premises we argue need to be challenged and confronted when considering EV (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1 Growth-oriented and colonial assumptions that affect the EV framework

Earth’s resources are unlimited. The Earth consists of a finite collection of resources, setting a limit on the amount, rate, and consequences of their extraction. This means that even if the distribution and design of products were done in a more equitable manner, the effects of a perpetually growing economy are an inevitable degradation and depletion of the Earth’s limited resources. Key planetary boundaries, including species abundance and the quality, function, and distribution of land and water could still be compromised despite the tempering of pollution [56]. While phenomena such as climate change and biodiversity loss are mentioned in the EV framework, planetary boundaries must be centered as a critical element for consideration.

The economy must grow. Economic growth has dominated as a “solution” to environmental and socioeconomic problems because localized improvements are achieved by shifting costs to racialized and classed peripheries, maintaining neocolonial and wealth-based hierarchies and practices in place. A growth-dependent economy that views the Earth’s resources and people as unlimited and dispensable will always find a new ecosystem and economy to grow into, even as some local environmental wins are achieved. Challenging a dependency on growth is the first step in addressing the human activities that perpetuate EV.

Industrialization is development. What lifestyles, levels of comfort, or everyday practices and norms should we aim for to improve social conditions? In a world where development means further integration into a system of capital accumulation, it is no surprise we find ourselves amidst multiple and interrelated crises that highlight the consequences of prioritizing capital above social and ecological welfare. Industrialization as development places well-being outside planetary boundaries and perpetuates narratives of progress that prioritize this integration above other social indicators of a good life.

Domination of people and place is inevitable. Translating the above challenges into just and sustainable governance structures will require a dismantling of neocolonial and neoliberal notions of resource management and a reimagining of political structures and practices that prioritize sustainability and social well-being over subjugation for profit. It is in such a context that collective and participatory, feminist, decolonial, and labor-empowering practices to political economic arrangements can flourish.

10 Don’t Look Up, Environmental Violence, and Apocalyptic Climate Allegories

Christiana Zenner

Engaging Environmental Violence

Amidst the popularizations of eco-crisis in movie and television media in the past two decades, the internationally vaunted ecofiction film Don’t Look Up (2021) stands as a recent, explicit near-term allegory for political-economic culpabilities, technocratic infatuations, and social-ecological consequences of anthropogenic climate changes. How might this contemporary, culturally acclaimed allegory help to illuminate some of the textures of environmental violence as proposed by Marcantonio and Fuentes; and how might notions of climate coloniality challenge the allegorical presentation of climate crisis in Don’t Look Up? Drawing on ecocinemacriticism, literary ecocriticism, contemporary Indigenous studies, and social theory, this chapter assesses the presumptive Whiteness of vaunted mainstream ecocinema as a form of cultural narrative; the generally myopic coloniality of apocalypse narratives; and linkages to other forms of spectacle in an international polity dependent on neoliberal political economics and structures of extraction. If these dynamics are interwoven with legacies of colonialism and racism, what are the implications for media representations of environmental violence?

Yule: “I don’t know, I’m starting to think that all this ‘end of the world’ stuff is bullshit.”

Kate Dibiasky: “It’s not. It’s definitely happening. I’ve seen it.”

–Don’t Look Up (2021)

“So much is invested in not noticing how social and institutional gatherings are restricted.”

–Sara Ahmed (2017)

“I’m curious to hear what it’s been like for you in this industry dominated by white dudes.”

–Yessenia Fuentes to Mary Annaïse Heglar (2021)

10.1 Introduction: Environmental Violence

Since the mid-2000s, feature films of a variety of genres have turned to ecological and ecocritical topics with increasing frequency – especially since the Hollywood disaster fiction film The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006). At present, documentaries, animated films, dramas/thrillers, and speculative fiction films continue to present themes such as the perils of anthropocentrism, the significance of planetary perspectives, the vitalities of the more-than-human world, and the underside of neoliberal political ecologies. Scholarly and pedagogical reflections on these topics have multiplied in recent years. In 2021, the Netflix feature film, Don’t Look Up – written and directed by Adam McKay – garnered international attention and much acclaim for its characterization of the political-economic culpabilities and social-ecological consequences of planetary destruction. In this chapter, I engage Don’t Look Up (hereafter, DLU) in order to reflect on dominant portrayals and understandings of environmental violence, as well as what this might mean for the aspiration toward critical climate justice and a more supple understanding of environmental violence. First, though, it is important to clarify the term “environmental violence.”

Marcantonio and Fuentes (2023) have proposed a model of environmental violence (EV) that intends to streamline and render a “more precise definition.” The authors rightly summarize that such a notion signifies across a range of discourses, from political ecology to ecocriticism (as in Rob Nixon’s “slow violence”) to environmental justice and environmental security. The approach proposed by Marcantonio and Fuentes focuses specifically on the global public health impacts of “human-produced harms by way of pollution emissions.” They describe EV as both a “human health hazard and a process” that, in each iteration, has structural dimensions; exploits vulnerabilities; and both creates and exacerbates a variety of harm and power differentials. The importance of the framework also consists in its aim to provide “a specific, functional, and measurable analytic … while, importantly, recharacterizing excess pollution as violence.” The authors link conceptual frameworks with policy imperatives – in this case, explicitly seeking ways to “drive support for more effective and restrictive policy” for reducing pollution. Since no frameworks are truly neutral, the utility of a framework resides not only in its descriptive accuracies, but also in relation to the goals and outcomes that orient it.

Two critiques of the EV framework are appropriate and relevant to this chapter’s argument. First, the focus of this framework is generally anthropocentric – that is, it attends primarily to human health and well-being, though there are connections to ecological and environmental health vis-à-vis the feedback loops between environmental degradation and global health or social well-being. As John Mulrow, Mariam Abazeri, Santanu Pai, and Max Ajl argue in this volume, one problem with this formulation is that it “centers the scope of [environmental] relations to an anthropocentric one in which humans and their health and exposure to chemicals and substances becomes the framework through which ecological entanglements are understood.” One effect is that “limiting violence to human-induced pollution and its consequences on human health erases the number of other ways violence is enacted and received within social and ecological relationships.” There is practical utility to this approach when considering public health interventions or policy initiatives, but it is nonetheless an incomplete lens. Second, while the EV framework rightly points to structures and power differentials, it does not explicitly name the legacies of colonialism, economic extractivism, and White supremacy that have determined the shape and preponderance of many instances and dynamics of EV into the present day. Addressing those considerations will be essential in refining the EV concept.

Many chapters in this volume rightly address real-world occasions, measures, and textures of environmental violence. I hope to add some additional dimensions to the conversation: What is the significance or role of fictional, allegorical storytelling in framing understandings of environmental violence, specifically through the allegory of climate crisis in Don’t Look Up? How do anthropocentrism and legacies of power and colonialism manifest in such ecofilm representations? How do media representations of environmental violences, including climate crises, fall prey to stereotyped framings and societal illusions across genres, and what kind of impacts do they have on attitudes and behaviors about climate changes? Such questions are, by no means, idle in an increasingly media-saturated and for-profit journalism world, when iconic businessmen exert major influence over the shape of journalism, and environmental content in both fiction and factual framework is frequently funded by fossil fuel corporations.

10.2 Ecocinema and Environmental Violence

Environmental events and motifs have become increasingly prominent in Engish-language films of the twenty-first century. Recent fictional hits like Don’t Look Up (2021) and prior classics from the early 2000s – such as Avatar (2009), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – all portray forms of environmental violence. Ecocinema, a categorization of these types of films, is also now an “interdisciplinary form of film studies … [that] works to bring back a sense of political participation to a field that has lost some of its explicit engagement with political issues,” according to film studies scholars Kääpä and Gustafsson in their influential co-edited volume, Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (2013). The ethical and political implications of ecocinema are genuine questions for many scholars and critics. How might ecocinema inform and shape perception? Kääpä and Gustafsson, for example, wonder whether “a transnational scope and sense of connectivity may expand producers and audiences’ ecological perception and cognitive abilities.” Might environmental values communicated in a film spark action? “Perhaps the real and most pertinent question we should ask is not how cinema can make a contribution to global ecopolitics,” they muse, “but whether, ultimately, it can do something beyond raise awareness.” Echoing this, Kiu-Wai Chu summarizes a question posed by Weik Van Meissner in 2014: “Can the viewers’ affective responses to ecocritical films lead them to take further action in solving or alleviating environmental problems of the world?”

The specific sub-genre of speculative fiction has effloresced in literature and film – sometimes as refractive commentary on the state of contemporary ecosocial realities, and sometimes offering prescriptive visions for alternatively imagined futures. Literary ecocritic Shelley Streeby notes that speculative fiction now serves as an umbrella category for a range of approaches to fiction, including sci-fi or cli-fi. Kiu-Wai Chu notes that in ecocinema, “speculative fictions, in the form of science fiction (sci-fi) or climate fiction (cli-fi), are increasingly dominant as a genre that lends itself readily to ideological interpretation and facilitates humans to foresee and prepare for the likely worsening conditions in the near future.” Streeby agrees, underscoring novelist Paolo Bacigalupi’s observation and hope that “by experiencing climate change ‘viscerally’ through fiction, instead of abstractly or theoretically, readers of cli-fi will be ready to ‘think long-term’ effectively.” DLU is situated in this matrix, and so, in this chapter, I am interested both in the story and, to quote film studies expert Adrian Ivakhiv, “the telling of the film itself – its discursive and narrative structures, its inter-textual relations with the larger world, its capacities for extending or transforming perception of the larger world – and the actual contexts and effects of the film and its technical and cultural apparatus in the larger world.” The story and its pericinematic context are, in effect, the text.

Unsurprisingly, this chapter will be most comprehensible to those who have viewed the film. As a summary, in the 2021 blockbuster Don’t Look Up, a just-discovered comet’s trajectory for Earth is identified by North American graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her Michigan State University adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stunned, the (White) scientists are drafted into the vortex of governmental science, political messaging, click-bait media, and entrepreneurial technocrats while trying to signal to a largely nonchalant and erratic audience that this “extinction-level event” is, in fact, going to destroy life on Earth in six months. Netflix’s byline for the film reads, “Two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humankind of a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth. The response from a distracted world: Meh.”

DLU is a spectacle of speculative fiction. With cinematographic stop-frame pacing, a rollicking soundtrack, and sardonic yet earnest and often hilarious dialogue, writer David Sirota and Director Adam McKay spin a contemporary diagnostic about how human societies governed by short-term economic and political thinking relate to flagrant atmospheric portents. Many commentators have rightly remarked upon the parallels with the civic, pandemic, climate-crisis perception moment in the United States: There’s the opposite-of-subtle, but damningly appropriate, depiction of political-corporate collusion and willful collective delusion at the hands of United States President Janie Orlean (played as a convincing narcissist by Meryl Streep) and CEO Peter Isherwood (Mark Rylance), a billionaire tech entrepreneur (his company is the aptly named BASH Cellular) whose modest demeanor belies the debased entrepreneurial power he wields as a shadow influence on government. There’s the steadfastly scientific, but politically over-it, Planetary Defense Coordination Office director Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) – the only protagonist who does not represent normative Whiteness – who makes the call to leak news of the comet to the media after the scientists are rebuffed by President Orlean and her sniveling, self-satisfied son Jason (Jonah Hill). Narcissicm, nepotism, economic and technological fatuousness, and ethical negligence collide in this thinly veiled allegory for contemporary anthropogenic climate changes, and the vicissitudes that lead to the total destruction of life on Earth. Through its absurdist political and technocratic characters in the face of extreme comet quandary, DLU cinematically strives to “challenge mainstream conventions by providing subversive impressions of their ideological connotations.” DLU is a speculative climate fiction film that has been characterized as satire, metaphor, analogy, parable, and allegory – often simultaneously, by its own creators.

10.3 Don’t Look Up as a Climate Change Allegory

Film studies scholars and literary ecocritics have developed nuanced ways of describing and analyzing media that deal with ecological, political, and social realities. In the case of DLU, several distinct interpretive strategies drawn from literary studies can help to illuminate the textures of this 2021 blockbuster and other cultural productions in light of environmental violence. The first central point is that DLU is an allegory, a claim made on multiple occasions by McKay himself. “I think that’s the way the movie works, as a direct allegory to climate,” he noted on PBS News. Screenwriter David Sirota likewise described the film as allegory when I co-interviewed him at an academic conference in 2022.

To better understand the concept of allegory, it is useful to turn to literary studies scholar Elizabeth Deloughery, whose book, Allegories of the Anthropocene, analyzes literary forms, representations, and realities of various anthropogenic environmental degradations. Deloughery cites critic Frederic Jameson: “If the allegorical is attractive for the present day and age it is because it models a relationship of breaks, gaps, discontinuities, and inner distances and incommensurabilities of all kinds. It can therefore better serve as a figure for the incommensurabilities of the world today.” She adds: “modern allegory often directs our attention to narratives of progress, authority, and development as myth.” A similar logic can be applied when analyzing the story told in DLU. The film depicts a standoff between ethically beleaguered scientists and feckless politicians allied with profit-oriented technocrats. The impasse, bolstered by ineffectual or ideological collective organizing, ultimately leads to the total destruction of humanity and all life on Earth. In the ecocinematic speculative fiction of DLU, the allegory presents irresolvable dissonances between political-economic ideology and biophysical/ecosocial reality.

Among the allegorical techniques that Deloughery identifies and DLU deploys is “scalar telescoping.” This technique moves descriptively between local and global (or planetary) perspectives. In DLU, there is a preponderance of cinematic scalar telescoping between the local, global, or planetary. For example, while nations of the world are collaborating to send missiles into the comet (aiming to break it into smaller pieces and thwart its destructive course), the scenes move among individuals in various parts of the globe under the spell of hopeful militarism; a panoramic of rocket launches; a space-shuttle-nose view of the upper atmosphere while the warhorse pilot resonant with Dr. Strangelove sings “Oh Susannah” and spouts racist stereotypes. Immediately thereafter, the BASH CEO summons President Orlean to a private conference and calls off the entire enterprise in the name of potential profit from mining the comet, as romances unfold on screen and sweeping orchestral music accompanies images redolent of the Enola Gay carrying nuclear warheads. In still other examples of scalar telescoping, the camera zooms out from a roiling political scene or concert and extends into extraterrestrial space, with the quiet dark floating sensibility of an astronaut or asteroid.

10.4 Allegory Is Not Algorithm

Allegories are not algorithms: The correlation is not always clean, and the upshots are subject to interpretation. Such irresolvability is often part of the point. But even beyond the productive dissonance between the imagined scenario of comet-induced planetary destruction and the reality of climate change, there are some disanalogies that bear mentioning in DLU. These disanalogies by no means discredit the project, and McKay willingly acknowledges several himself. Still, the incongruities are important to reflect upon, lest viewers take too blithe a view of the project of allegorical correlation and interpretation.

For example, in DLU the comet’s strike is perceived within only a six-month time frame; its course is direct, and its effects are uniform across the planet. Climate change impacts, by contrast, are accretionary and distributed, while also accelerating over time spans. In DLU the comet’s threat has a singular cause; in climate change, there are multiple causes, effects, and ongoing feedback loops in complex systems. In DLU the comet has “natural” (extra-human) atmospheric and interstellar causes over vast periods of geological time, but contemporary climate changes are disproportionately and decisively amplified by human histories of colonization, racialized labor and property regimes, extractivism, and consumption. Where the comet will cause an unarguably uniform, planetary-wide cataclysm, human histories of colonialism and extractivism could have been – and still could be – otherwise. This aspect of the specter of catastrophe or apocalypse is the most crucial disanalogy between DLU and climate change, and it is worth delving into in more detail. Not all finality is morally equivalent.

10.5 Apocalypse, How?

Leonardo DiCaprio, in a publicity video for Netflix France, noted that the climate challenge is crucial right now because it determines whether “as a species [we] can evolve to truly focus on what is ultimately the most important issue that has ever faced humanity in the history of civilization.” (Multiple other quotes could be adduced to similar effect.) Here, the climate crisis is framed as singular, unitary, and equally apocalyptic for all humans everywhere on Earth. But this characterization is erroneous, it glosses over vast differentials in wealth, power, and privilege and how these render some people vulnerable to environmental violence, while others can evade it. This fundamental set of structural, yet specific, inequalities is crucial to note. Where Marcantonio and Fuentes’ framework notes these explicitly, DLU did not. Perhaps the biggest point of dissonance between the film’s storyline and climate change is that the social severity of climate impacts, unlike comet hits, reflect vast differentials of power and privilege.

There is also an important question to be raised about the colonial fetishization of apocalypse or catastrophe narratives. Yes, the slow dramatic catastrophes of anthropogenic climate change are distinctive in some ways in the present moment – they are not necessarily singular. Decolonial and Indigenous scholars have been pointing out for some time that the destruction of worlds – social, cultural, environmental, economic, political, bodily – is part of the premise and function of coloniality. Apocalypse, viewed with this insight, is neither new nor singular. Instead, the devastation of worlds has been going on for a long time; what is new is that Whiteness is perceiving it as a threat to established colonial formations of life.

Consider two temporal scales of destruction. The first scale is the centuries-long dynamics of colonialism and destruction of Indigenous ways of life; the second, related scale of destruction, is in the decades-long climate change impacts for marginalized communities and bioregions such as islands. Unfortunately, these realities have received little to no attention from dominant international powers or mainstream White western creators. Apocalyptic allegories such as DLU play into this category error: Not all environmental violences are created equal, nor are they external to, or independent of, historical colonial extractivist practices.

From an explicitly decolonial perspective, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd have argued that, to attend sufficiently to colonialism in the genesis of anthropogenic climate change would be to highlight:

… the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-determination of other communities and societies violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene.

Davis and Todd cite Kyle Powys Whyte, a leader in articulating distinctive Indigenous studies approaches to climate change that recognize both attention to seasonality and place, and recurring violent histories of disruption. Whyte diagnoses how “climate injustice is part of a cyclical history situated within the larger struggle of anthropogenic environmental change catalyzed by colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism.” A complementary insight about the cyclicality of colonial history comes from Nick Estes, in his powerful book Our History is the Future, where Estes rightly diagnoses that “settler narratives use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land,” but for Indigenous communities, “our history is the future,” and even amid the ongoing destructions of capitalism and extractivism and White supremacy, there are revolutionary practices and theories built into Indigenous community experience.

For their part, Davis and Todd underscore that “the story we tell ourselves about environmental crises” matters enormously for “what we need to do.” They suggest that, “if we use the momentum that this concept has gained to train our imaginations to the ways in which environmental destruction has gone hand in hand with colonialism, then we can begin to address our relations in a much wider context.” Something similar might be said of climate change in the popular imagination more generally, and in the film DLU specifically. Noteworthy is the absence from DLU of centuries of colonial or racist history beyond the lifespan of the current political operatives characterized with absurd plausibility in the film. Unlike an Earth-annihilating comet, anthropogenic amplifications to climate changes are entirely sociogenic and uneven in impacts that derive from histories of colonialism, extractivism, and enslavement – and they manifest in deep and abiding climate injustices. It is problematic that McKay and prominent actors associated with DLU fail to recognize this, even when speaking explicitly about DLU as allegory for climate change and political inaction. So, while it is laudable for ecocinema and other cultural productions to turn attention to matters of climate change and destruction, it is hubris to suggest that this apocalypse is sudden, or new, or (to paraphrase DiCaprio) that we “as a species” need to attend to the destruction of “civilization.” For unmarked in that “we” is a Whiteness that conveniently glosses over the histories of loss and patterns of identifiable historical responsibility for planetary climate changes – patterns that are, at core, traceable to Western extractive political-economic paradigms, and which continue in the present day. It should not come as a surprise, then, that beyond film, there are many other “theaters” where this kind of performativity takes root.

10.6 Theaters of Climate Privilege

Feature films are not the only cultural productions where the causal tentacles of colonialism, racialized labor and property regimes, and extractivism occur. Geographer Farhana Sultana has identified a different, but quite related, kind of spectacle: international negotiations on climate agreements, specifically COP26. “The COP 26 can be seen as one of the theaters of climate colonialism (led mainly by corporations, powerful governments, and elites),” she writes.

International climate negotiations falter in addressing climate change without meaningfully reducing fossil fuel dependency, growth models, and hyper consumption, along with the systems that undergird them across scales. Rather, these spaces become spectacles, one of performance, that erases historical and spatial geopolitics and power relations.

“Climate coloniality” is a useful heuristic that points to how these entrenched extractivist, capitalist dynamics perpetuate cycles of carbon emissions, displacement and forced migration, and many attendant inequities linked to colonialism, racism, and extractivism. As Sultana and others powerfully point out, these dynamics of “colonialism, capital, and empire” are not merely historical, but are ongoing. In Sultana’s analysis: “Ongoing climate coloniality is expressed through insidious racism globally and continued Othering, dispossessions through colonial-capitalist extractivism and commodification, rapacious displacement and destruction, creation of sacrifice zones, and excessive exposures to harms from climate-induced disasters.” Moreover, “because much of the underdeveloped Global South provided the resources that overdeveloped the Global North over centuries through colonialism and then imperialism and neocolonialism, many countries in the former were left less capable of addressing climate impacts and having reduced or ineffective state capacities.” The error in thinking of climate changes as a planetary or species-wide problem that affects all humans on the planet equally is clear.

What then is a White creator, scholar, or politician from a climate-privileged position or dominant nation-state to do? Theological ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda notes that recognition of “climate debt or climate colonialism” is frequent in nations of the Global South and oppressed communities of the Global North; so what is needed is people “in climate-privileged sectors [who] will help forge paths away from this scenario of climate injustice and toward a more just and human future, what some call ‘climate justice.’” Moe-Lobeda puts the matter plainly by demanding attention to the differences between “the climate privileged and the climate condemned. Who causes climate change in relationship to who dies from it is a foremost moral issue of the early twenty-first century … Climate change may be the most far-reaching manifestation of White privilege and class privilege yet to face humankind.” What is needed, then, from McKay and others is more recognition of climate privilege, and less reliance on the trope of apocalypse, in order to find ways forward.

10.6.1 Climate Crisis and the Whiteness of Mainstream Media

DLU is an important contribution to mainstream film culture, and McKay has a knack for burrowing into myopic economic-political structures, as well as the psychologies of power and profit that fuel their perpetuation. His distinctive, sardonic absurdism allows audiences simultaneously to laugh and to absorb the severity of the spectacles that govern conditions of social existence. Personally, as a White woman with a particularly dry euro-american feminist sense of humor, I loved much of the movie: Kate Dibiansky’s incredulity at being ripped off in the White House by a military general, or her disdain and incredulity that talk-show hosts would fail to understand the world-ending concern. (“We make the bad news good!” proclaims Bree, Cate Blanchett’s vodka-slugging TV host character.) The consistency of Dibiasky’s literal eye rolls is more than metaphor for all of the absurdities that smart women wielding facts must bear in a profit-preferential patriarchal polity.

Another figure, external to the plot or cast of characters, is also deeply imbricated in the film and worthy of consideration. Numerous interviews have featured Adam McKay – centrally, extensively, and often exclusively. (Fewer have featured David Sirota, who was also key in the genesis of the film’s concept and screenwriting.) So, it is worth asking how the film fits into broader social dynamics, not just of representation (where are the plot-driving characters of color, or polities beyond the United States?), but also of creative authority. In other words, it is also worth asking, why Adam McKay, for Netflix, on climate change, now? Why him, and not someone else? Yes, he has an impressive track record in television and film. And yet, on the issue of climate change, he’s new to the plot, but also centralizes himself with regard to it. McKay is as much a figure in the pericinematic context of the film as are any of the main characters.

This centripetal energy is underscored and lauded by DiCaprio (who plays scientist Dr. Randall Mindy) in the interview with Netflix France. DiCaprio hails McKay as an “incredibly outspoken individual on the climate crisis,” someone who succeeded in producing a movie about a contentious topic. Here, the film’s creator is lauded for having achieved a synthesis of ethics and craft; the film is a story told through his eyes, a world created and destroyed, an allegorical instruction. “I just love the way that he ended this film,” DiCaprio gushes,

… because it makes us take a hard look at where we are going, and the fact that a lot of this stuff is slowly becoming irreversible, and that we have this very finite window of ten years to make this transition. If we’re not voting for leaders or supporting everything that has to do with climate mitigation, we’re going to have a fate very similar to these characters. We’re already feeling the ramifications of the climate crisis, and the world is going to be a very different place for years to come … we are seeing the ramifications of what scientists have been telling us for the past few decades. … It’s not that we’re not listening, we’re just not taking the necessary action.

Here, I am curious about the ways that the White male becomes the revered and praised storyteller, whose creative productions are facilitated and promoted over others. This is not a question for McKay alone, but for other White creators – especially White men – who have access to major platforms and the confidence to pitch those stories. The potential problem is, as Shelley Streeby points out in Imagining the Future of Climate Change, that the imaginations and complications of planetary dynamics, climate changes, more-than-human forces, and neoliberal social formations have been engaged for decades in speculative fiction and collective action – from Ursula LeGuin to Octavia Butler into the present day with considerable nuance by writers of color, and notably, by women+ writers of color such as NK Jemisin. So why is the White male still the revered, praised, and promoted storyteller for climate change allegories – and not other voices? Whose allegory is it anyway?

10.6.2 On the Power of Institutionalized Authority

McKay’s distinctive creativity in DLU should be saluted, even as it is important to question the dynamics that foreground White male creatives who raise the alarm on climate changes as if it were a newly discovered issue. By “White men” here I mean, in one sense, individual men (usually cis-gendered) who happen to be racialized White and who benefit from the structures of White supremacy in patriarchal contexts – including educational privilege, collective political power, a general lack of gendered or racialized bodily endangerment, and the kinds of confidence that can derive from these often-invisible psychosocial freedoms. (McKay is in this sense a White man.) Of course, not all White men assume their privilege to be natural or neutral, but this points to the second way that I use the term: White masculinity is the terrain on which American discourse is constructed; it is the norm, the baseline, from which all else is deviation. Thus, I am following the approach articulated by Sara Ahmed, who writes: by “white men I am referring to an institution,” a way of organizing the world and authority and experience within it. She continues:

When we talk of white men, we are describing something. We are describing an institution. An institution typically refers to a persistent structure or mechanism of social order governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given community. So when I am saying that white men is an institution, I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure.

This is not a new problem. But it is work to push against this normativity, precisely because the baseline is White and generally male. In the United States it is incontrovertible that White men’s voices and perspectives will be valued above others – whether in the context of gun violence, bodily autonomy, or environmental racism. In the context of climate change, this truism remains even though there is a stunning range of voices, perspectives, and local experts who have been writing, directing, producing, and creating communications about climate change for decades. But still, the White male expert endures. As Ahmed says, “It is ironic, really, or perhaps not: you do not need to assert yourself when the genealogy does it for you.”

One very simple outcome of this terrain is that some White men tend to exhibit a certitude, or at least a lack of anxiety, about the integrity of their creative output on matters of social concern. McKay is a case in point: Numerous interviews across multiple media platforms attest that he is confident that the problems he’s pointing to are real, and that his film is a useful depiction that may have lasting legacies. He is not, apparently, interested in raising the question of whether he may have misrepresented anything; or that others might have works worthy of equal Netflix funding or promotion; or that there may be tokenist representations in his film. Perhaps most troubling, for me, is that in interviews, McKay does not point to any non-White scholars or activists as informing his thought or leading on matters of climate, even though their numbers are many. He is lauded as a hero by other White male actors, such as Leonardo DiCaprio. He names his production company after a much-vaunted notion, “Hyperobjects,” coined by ecocritic Timothy Morton. These vaunted men’s conceptions of the project situate it as a particularly potent example, not just of cli-fi, but also of the project of singularity that often accompanies White males’ turn of attention to this issue. Again, I concur that McKay and his team have created an important film, one that I enjoyed, and which has troubled my thoughts enough to warrant an entire essay on it. But who speaks authoritatively about climate change; who is lauded for doing so; and how that replicates systems of elision while reifying a White male creator – these are the questions that interest me.

So again: What is a White climate-privileged creator to do? When creators who also represent demographics of climate privilege have the podium, it would be stupendous to see them name those who have been precursors to their work and to engage citations as forms of gratitude and education, as Ahmed (2017) and Max Liboiron (2021) demonstrate. For creatives, as well as academics of climate privilege, this means that direct naming of prior and current creatives/authors is imperative – use the podium to point, not just to one’s own creative intent, but also to those trying to navigate these themes from spaces often occluded by mainstream media. Send some easter eggs and shout-outs their way, but better yet, hire them as writers, consultants, and experts. Cite and engage professors Michael Mann and Timothy Morton, sure; but why not also call on doctors Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Katharine Hayhoe, or Katharine Wilkinson, or writers Mary Annaïse Heglar and NK Jemisin, to name just a few? This is, of course, only a beginning to the problem of whose stories and authorities are told and revered across Western/Euroamerican media. But, it is a start.

Perhaps the presumptive authority of the White male with regard to the significance of climate crises can, in fact, lead to salutary effects in some quarters. It is familiar and, thus, may have mass appeal to a White-dominant culture, where DLU may have the potential to impact middle-left or centrist viewers in positions of economic and political power. Time will tell. I am here suggesting that, in light of their default presumption of social authority and the fact of White men as institution, at a minimum, such creators should point toward those who have been working on the issues steadfastly, longer, and in immersive contexts that generate different forms of authority and narrative.

These questions of authorship, creative ethical commentary on climate change, and White privilege are not easy. The persistence of the vaunted White male creator figure – the way he is often viewed as a genius, the way he does not cite his sources (and if he does, they are usually fellow White men) – suggests that it is time to think about an ethics of presentation and an ethics of citation for multi-genre cli-fi in an era of rampant environmental violences. For how violence looks depends, in no small part, on how one has experienced, borne witness to, or studied it. I would argue that White creators (myself included), in particular, need to think ethically about the parameters and citations of their (our) projects, not just as top-down theatrical creations that raise attention to a global singularity and embody the vision of a particular creative figure, but, rather, in connection with persistent colonial dynamics in climate change storytelling. They/we also need to listen to, advocate for, and indeed sometimes step to the side for, those who have been doing the work longer, better, and with more community accountability.

Specifically, I would argue that White creators – especially White males – have a responsibility to consider, cite, and decenter themselves as singular storytellers, to point toward, honor, and learn from the theorists and writers from marginalized contexts who have been working on these issues for a long time. White male creators with industry access can also advocate to powerful studies (from Netflix to Hollywood and beyond) that those kinds of stories get told, and by the experts who have intimately known and created them. Much of this work is ongoing in various genres, of course. The hope is that such attention helps to remedy some of the epistemic violences that perpetuate unequal dynamics of power in the imaginations of climate changes, climate futures, and the question of authority. This matters because, as the conditions of DLU’s creation imply, the Whiteness of climate change perception and portrayal is real.

10.7 Conclusion

There is both allure and peril to theorizing planetary changes through allegorical film. Creator Adam McKay is to be commended for his allegorical film Don’t Look Up that foregrounds various forms of culpable structures, collusions, and inactions. However, in conversation with social theorists, this essay has also argued that DLU replicates particular kinds of epistemic violences that, unfortunately, do little to demonstrate or suggest ways forward in the particular context of climate colonialism and climate privilege. While a reading of the film and its attendant modes of creation, dissemination, and popularization can yield important insights and constructive suggestions for ways forward in ecofilm, the fundamental question posed by film scholars about the genre of ecocinema persists when the western White male gaze is taken as the primary lens on the problems of climate change. These quandaries leave unanswered the question about the interrelation between cultural productions and ethical action. To incorporate these critiques into both the production of ecocinema and the discourses of environmental violence are ongoing, important, and create tasks ahead.

11 The Normative Environmental Discourse in Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu

Santiago Navarrete Astorquiza

Engaging Environmental Violence

Environmental violence (EV) is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society’s most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. The EV perspective approaches society and what is human-made or derived as intertwined with what encloses nature – questioning whether there is a division between humans and nature. Certain cultural aspects can be perceived as subordination to a power structure but could also transgress or subvert it. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and EV, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which excess production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. In the following pages, I trace how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with EV by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

11.1 Introduction

Columbus’s diary and the letters he wrote that still survive until now, edited mainly by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, make evident what O’Gorman called the invention of America. The European mindset of Columbus and Vespucci did not have the epistemological frame to incorporate another continent’s geographic and historical existence absent in the Ptolemean map of the world. The Cartas de relación, written by Francisco Pizarro (describing the conquest of Peru), and the letters written by Hernán Cortes on the conquest of Mexico drew upon the European gaze over the territory and its populations. Nature, territory, human bodies, animals, and everything that affected their senses was described and understood (it became knowledge) under the scope of European referents. That frame created a regional literature representing itself, its inhabitants, and the environment filtered by the colonial logic since the Hispanic conquest. Since then, the complicity or the fracture with the dominant episteme has created various discourses on the local and regional nature and the behaviors of its populations. Whether or not all these discourses are environmentalists themselves, they wonder how to use nature to serve human needs and how humans must behave to make their land and themselves more productive. The texts by Alexander Von Humboldt maintain a similar vision regarding creating an inventory of the resources in the New Continent. With the wars of independence came a change in the vision of the region’s economy. The political discourses of the republican era claimed agriculture and mining as necessary for the region’s progress and as a colonial holding, respectively. The narratives influenced by the social realism of the twentieth century depicted natures under the recurrent threat of being dominated or as the dominating force keeping development away from the region. During that period, Pablo Neruda wrote and published the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu. This text is not exempt from the Latin American tradition’s constant literalization of the relationship between humans and nature. Even if it is using language in an innovative way to poeticize that relation, it is not necessarily a predecessor of contemporary texts. More recently, with the advent of the twenty-first century, Latin American literature’s paradigmatic division between humans and nature has been contested, generating a varied search for interrelations between economic development, the human body, and the environment.

Neruda’s poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, corresponds with a long poem in which 12 cantos can be read as a unit and as a set of autonomous poems. Alturas de Macchu Picchu describes the journey of the poetic voice to the top of the famous Andean mountain and his subsequent descent. My approach to the text focuses on Canto I, where the poetic voice establishes the symbolic oppositions for fertility and death. Although those antagonisms order the poem, there is a debate about the function of the first canto. Fesltiner reads the first and second cantos as the beginning of the poetic voice’s journey. For Felstiner, the first canto “sets in motion the imagery of fruitless wandering” and “the poem’s coordinates in time and space” (p. 156). According to this reading, the first canto happens in the present, in a modern city where the poetic voice begins his path toward the ruins and the past of Macchu Picchu. On the other side, the reading of Santí sees the first canto, not as part of the journey itself, but as a prologue. Based on the structure of another of Neruda’s works, Residencia en la tierra, Santí proposes that the first canto of Alturas is “a prologue that summarizes the argument of the poem” (p. 125), being “instability and material dispersion,” as well as uncertainty, the thematic nodes of the stanzas of this canto.

I align with Santí’s interpretation; however, Felstiner’s translation is helpful for my analysis, even if he reads the first canto as a point of departure, rather than as an aperture or introduction to the poem. In Canto I, the poetic voice uses language to raise a series of associations and oppositions between a past in which harmony with nature prevails and a modern present separated from it. The following cantos of the poem revise the historical past of the city of Macchu Picchu. Cantos II to XII describe how the poetic voice changes from an unsatisfactory life determined by an alienating mode of production to become a subject committed to the past. After experiencing what Bauman would call an accelerated individualization common in liquid modernity, the poetic voice finds a solid identity by embodying the forgotten voices of the people oppressed by colonial systems. In the poem’s final canto, the poetic voice asks to mediate between the unheard and lost voices, past and present –who represent the human cost of any monumental activity, and the contemporary reader. The poem addresses a forgotten community and talks to a universal audience. In the poem, silencing those voices results from establishing an economic system that commodifies and instrumentalizes bodies and natural resources. Therefore, there is a questioning of the origin and perpetuation of the cultural imaginaries that assume the function of Latin America as a zone of extraction in the international market.

Although, that question does not make the text part of what is known as the export age literature from Latin America. The function of Latin America as a source of resources for the globe and its presence in the text appears through the notions of a binary conceptualization of gender and sexuality. The feminine representation of America traces back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the continent was associated, as Rogers states, with “depictions of South American earth as a virginal female space that European male explorers seek to claim and possess” (pp. 14–15). These gendered depictions disguised the indigenous bodies and the extractive enterprises in the continent behind the images of feminine, childish, or maternal landscapes that needed to be domesticated by the male European imaginary. The opposition between the male/female qualities of the European/American territories assumes that there is a given superiority of the male over the female to justify dominance.

The cultural associations of America and its cultures with a pejorative conceptualization of the female gender are also part of the technological and economic changes introduced by the Spanish colonization. Consider, for example, how people produced gold in the region of Potosí (present-day Bolivia) between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gold had a ceremonial significance, a religious value, for the Inca empire that ruled the region before the Spanish conquest. However, gold was economically valuable for the Spanish: It embodied wealth. In the Inca empire, extracting gold and producing artifacts from it was based on a process known as “mita.” This process involved the use of water, rollers, and platens. In the process, the participation of men and women established a society that built its cities and roads based on the quantities obtained, processed, and transported from Potosí to other centers of the empire. The limitations of the quantities obtained were, in a way, the result of the cultural meaning attributed to gold. Therefore, to preserve that meaning and its value in comparison to other materials, mita was an appropriate technique that served a purpose for this culture. Mita works as a sign of their worldview. The empire’s need and demand for gold were related to and reflected their ways of giving meaning to the precious metal. But after the conquest, the mita process proved insufficient to satisfy the crown’s demands. Silver and gold were needed to produce coins and introducing mercury into the extraction process made it more efficient.

Nevertheless, using mercury decimated native and enslaved populations, while polluting the environment. This change increased the amount of gold and silver obtained. Thus, although the value of gold is attributed to the same material, it does not have the same cultural meaning. The introduction of a different use for gold and the establishment of another set of cultural and economic values changed humans’ relationship with this mineral.

In Neruda’s text, the negative effect of colonization is communicated by the poetic voice lamenting the degradation and silencing of Latin American people. Through the poem, the voice depicts his present and modern conditions of life as an adverse effect of the colonial economic system. The regret felt by the poetic voice seeks to recover the vitality lost due to the rupture between humankind and nature. However, the poem refers to the whole species as men and associates the concept of vitality with virility. What is lost and makes modern life unbearable for the poetic voice is the lack of firmness, steadiness, and authenticity in the daily experience of life. The poetic voice sees the present as a rupture with nature, which is structural to modern society’s rational and organized lifestyle. The longing of the poetic voice starts by questioning how the distance from nature affects every aspect of life: from food and clothing to desire, pleasure, and death. However, he conceptualizes his depictions of vitality and virility by opposing the ideal past to a pathologized present. The poetic voice uses different figures to describe this conceptual opposite but is constant in its proximity to death or death in life. When the poetic self (or the river in Canto VIII) embodies that conceptual opposite, he experiences it as a loss that changes original, natural conduct. The poem promotes a harmonious relationship with nature. However, it does so within a normative logic that structures its motifs.

I will closely read the poem’s first canto in the following pages. I will focus on the structural opposition between life and death in the canto. This duality is represented by associating life, fecundity, and reproductivity with the past and the steadiness of the rock. In contrast, the text associates death with a present in which everything is momentary, transitory, futile, and meaningless. The poetic voice refers to pejorative figures of emasculated subjects to associate the present as a modern time detached from nature. The following analysis aims to generate a reading of the canto that exposes the continuities between Nerudian poetic discourse and contemporary environmentalist discourse. This continuity depends mainly on the fear of the impossibility of securing a future, but also on looking to create a different relationship with nature by questioning modern ways of production and consumption. This analysis’s second objective is to question fecundity’s function as a symbol of harmony between humans and nature. The images of fecundity emerge in the canto when a balanced relationship between humans and nature results in a harmonious culture. However, this approach resorts to the figure of the emasculated subject as the negative effect of the rupture between past and present and between humans and nature because of the instauration of a modern mode of production. Hence, the third objective of this analysis is to expose the disparaging vision of the emasculated body as a symptom. In the canto, the poetic voice seeks to evade this figure of dubious and unnamed identity, moving between the present and the past in search of stability to ground himself. Finally, this analysis seeks to define the negative representation of this figure as a sign of cultural violence. This sign allows us to expand the existing relationship between culture and EV in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century.

For this analysis, I will focus on Williams’ proposal on the emergence of the nature/culture dichotomy in Western thought. For Williams, this rupture is a consequence of technical and industrial development. I also draw on Marcantonio’s definition of EV and its relationship with Galtung’s cultural violence concept. This relationship allows the articulation of the concept of EV with the contemporary use of extractivism in Latin American cultural and literary studies. Additionally, I draw on Seymour’s, Mortimer-Sandilands, and Erickson’s critiques of contemporary environmentalist discourses and their alliance with normative ideas of reproductivity. Through these methodological resources, I hope to question the necessity of futurity and its allusion to heterosexual fecundity as a condition for environmental studies.

To demonstrate that this interpretation is possible, first, I present a methodological articulation between the concept of EV and the use of extractivism in literary studies. Second, I will investigate how the first canto of the Nerudian poem assigns a negative valuation to gender expressions that do not classify within the masculine/feminine binary. Thirdly, I will analyze how that attribution justifies the longing for a harmonious past between humans and nature. Throughout the analysis of the first canto, I will identify the poetic devices that articulate human fecundity and infertility as signs of a fractured relationship with nature.

11.2 From Environmental Violence to Literary Analysis: A Methodological Articulation

It is difficult to find a connection between the EV framework and the relationship concerning extractivism and the cultural production of the twentieth century from the Andean region of South America. The focus of my analysis is located “outside of the mine.” Meanwhile, most of the approximations of the concept of extractivism have taken the scopes of political economy, sociology, and anthropological perspectives. Hence, they approximate to extractivism from the “inside of the mine.” These approaches have made visible how race and class endure as identity categories that exacerbate power and economic differences. In the extractive zones, which are marginalized, but made profitable by the extraction of natural resources, colonial logics of social hierarchization are still visible. The urban and political centers in Latin America draw upon the structural marginalization of ethnic groups to profit from the expropriation and the extraction of resources in protected territories. The studies around extractivism have also established how in discourse, nature and femineity are associated and valued as inferior to the masculine symbolization of progress. Consequently, the structural differences culturally associated with gender are also fundamental to establishing power in the urban and political centers of economic consumption and circulation. As seen, the opposition between the urban and rural areas of society is fundamental to the phenomenon of extractivism in Latin America as well.

My analysis aims to make visible the influence and presence of extractivism outside of the extractive zones. I seek to understand how extractivism is present in texts that do not explicitly depict the mines or the resources obtained through extractive practices. My approximation aims to find a way to undermine the oppositions over which the extractive discourse seems to emerge. My path comes from other explorations that establish an articulation between the economic activities necessary to reproduce the material conditions of life and the discourses that legitimize, naturalize, or question the systematization of those activities. Thus, my approach identifies how a dialectic relationship ties discourse with the economic base. The link between these two separate spheres is theoretical, if not rhetorical. That division is the metaphor for the base and the superstructure in classical Marxist theory. The metaphor is a substation of some terms for others: a wordplay. Base and superstructure are not theoretical concepts, but just an image that helps explain how people talk, think, and communicate their ideas about why and how people intervene in nature to stay alive in this world. Besides the theoretical limitations of the metaphor, it is still revisited and updated by scholars who find it to be a tool to make the relationship between institutions, power, discourse, and economic praxis visible.

While analyzing Neruda’s poem, the metaphor helps explain how the poetic discourse could have any relation to extractivism, even though it is about a man who visits the ruins of Macchu Picchu for the first time. Neruda’s poetic discourse corresponds with a cultural production that questions, from the superstructure, the reproduction of the activities at society’s material and economic base. The contact of the male subject with the ancient past makes it possible for him to see the effects of what EV would be. When Neruda reaches Macchu Picchu, he realizes he has been trying to escape the tedious and meaningless life caused by modern production conditions. His life in the modern cities is negatively affected by economic practices. At the core of these practices, the poetic voice identifies a broken relationship between humanity and nature; the human activities are therefore a deviation from nature, which is conceptualized as destiny. The pollution in the cities, the lack of personal connections, and the impossibility of relating to others and giving meaning to everyday objects beyond their instrumentalization make the poetic subject experience life as a void. In Canto II, the poetic voice says:

Cuántas veces en las calles de invierno de una ciudad o en un autobús o un barco en el crepúsculo, o en la soledad más espesa, la de la noche de fiesta, bajo el sonido de sombras y campanas, en la misma gruta del placer humano, me quise detener a buscar la eterna veta insondable que antes toqué en la piedra o en el relámpago que el beso desprendía. (vv. 45–50)

How many times in the city’s winter streets or in a bus or a boat at dusk, or in the densest solitude, that of night festivity, under the sound of shadows and bells, in the very cave of human pleasure, have I wanted to stop and seek the timeless fathomless vein I touched in a stone once or in the lightning a kiss released.

The poetic voice associates those deleterious conditions of the present times with a colonial past. The imposition of a colonial structure fractured humans’ supposedly harmonic relationship with nature in the pre-Columbian era (as will be explained in the following section of this chapter). Therefore, Neruda’s poem establishes a relationship between the direct and indirect harm produced by an economic praxis that exacerbated and created power differentials at the individual, community, regional and global scales.¹

The difficulty of merging the EV frame with the approach of extractivism relies on the fact that Neruda’s text condenses the harmful effects of the economy on vulnerable populations in the image of the emasculated subject. In other words, even if Neruda’s poem aims for a just, sustainable, and fulfilling economic system, he reproduces a pejorative representation of a pathologized male subject to promote change.

The recurrence of that representation in the text makes it a structural motif of the poem. The poetic subject’s desire to affirm, secure, and set his identity as a male mestizo drives his adventure of traveling from the modern city to the ruins and the historical past. He is escaping from the association of the indigenous identity with the blurred, unstable, and fluctuating, but he considers those characteristics to be long-term effects of the past, not only because of how practices that involved toxic pollutants like mercury, as mentioned before, decimated the workers of the mines. The virility of the poetic subject is threatened by historical and structural violence that defines his place in the world. Those adverse effects are associated with an ill environment that the poetic voice wants to regenerate. In addition, those effects also determine the character of the poetic subject and the subjective experience he has of the world. The ungrounded experience he finds in the present is perceived as a spectral vision of the colonial conditions in the daily life economy. Hence, the enterprise to revive himself and his epoch requires the derogatory conceptualization of a deviant masculine identity and the longing for its precarious state.

Nonetheless, the ill environment and the emasculated subject are not always represented as different motifs. The opposition between the male identity and a non-identity is structural because it integrates the environment and the subject. This integration happens, for example, when the poetic subject interacts with non-human entities like the river in Canto VIII:

Oh, Wilkamayu de sonoros hilos, cuando rompes tus truenos lineales en blanca espuma, como herida nieve, cuando tu vendaval acantilado canta y castiga despertando al cielo, qué idioma traes a la oreja apenas desarraigada de tu espuma andina? (vv. 213–219)

Oh Wilkamayu of resonant threads, when you shatter your bands of thunder into white spume, like wounded snow, when your steep gale sings and slashes arousing the sky, what language do you bring to the ear barely uprooted from your Andean foam?

In these verses, the river doesn’t have a voice to respond. It lost its strength as it went from the highest mountain to the valley. The mentions of the wounds and the uprooted ears link the gone virility with the descent of the river. In addition, using native terms in the canto establishes the resemblance of the now silent river with the agony of the culture who named it. Thereby, the opposition non-identity/identity codes the language employed to poeticize the history of the colonial system.

The resource to the unnamed queer indigenous identity justifies the enunciation of a masculine intervention. However, the image of the queer identity as a burden is a transposition into poetic discourse of the processes that reduce and reinforce the ability for marginalized people to work against the effects of EV.² Emasculation cannot make a subject vulnerable to pollution just by itself. In a quantitative study, emasculation doesn’t function as a variable of the effects of EV in a population. But in Neruda’s poem, the figure of the emasculated subject is persuasive. It has the function to motivate action against a system that prioritizes profit over the hazards of pollution in human lives. Neruda’s poetic subject has a voice unlike the men of the past who lost theirs (loss that is also representative of their emasculation). To talk for, or instead of, the others based on the possession of a voice is a re-masculinization of their discourse. It is the male mestizo subject who can speak, and his voice represents himself as a subject compared to those who lack it and cannot be a subject anymore.

Hitherto, the aims to change the economic system at its fundamental and conceptual relationship between human and nature end up, tragically, disseminating a symbol of violence against a vulnerable population. That contradiction informs the problem of who are included and excluded in the environmental discourse. Using the emasculated subject as a negative symbol relies on the determinacy of nature over humanity. Gender, under the poem’s logic, is the effect of a biological sex difference (associated with nature). Thus, the poem portrays a society’s strength, dynamism, fecundity, and wealth as consequences of a correspondence between those biological differences and human behavior. The assumption of a natural correspondence between gender and sex reproduces the colonial mechanism of instrumentalizing difference to legitimize violence against subjects who do not classify within the reproductive norm.

11.3 Canto I: Interpreting the Bodies Turning into Iron

The structural function of the motif explained in the previous section appears for the first time in Canto I. Neruda wrote Alturas after he visited the city of Macchu Picchu around 1942 and 1943. After touring the city’s ruins, in his book Confieso que he vivido, he describes what it was like to arrive in the ancient city and how it inspired him.³ There he had a kind of epiphany that led him to write the poem that begins as follows:

Del aire al aire, como una red vacía, iba yo entre las calles y la atmósfera, llegando y despidiendo, en el advenimiento del otoño la moneda extendida de las hojas, y entre la primavera y las espigas, lo que el más grande amor, como dentro de un guante que cae, nos entrega como una larga luna. (vv. 1–6)

From the air to the air, like an empty net, I went on through streets and thin air, arriving and leaving behind, at autumn’s advent, the coin handed out in the leaves, and between spring and ripe grain, the fullness that love, as in a glove’s fall, gives over to us like a long-drawn moon.

The first lines of this stanza are a comparison. Neruda’s poetic voice narrates how he was in the city and was trapped in that atmosphere, going from one side to the other. He seems almost trapped between the streets on the ground and the atmosphere in the sky. The empty net that captures the attention of the poetic self becomes an element of exchange or transaction. That atmosphere in which the poetic voice was walking announces the change of season from summer to autumn. It refers to transitioning from a period of much sunshine and fertility (connoted in the ripe grain) to a time representing a slow suspension of vitality. In one way or another, the advent of autumn links the series of landscape elements that represent the changes of the season. Therefore, the poetic discourse’s atmosphere allows communication between two different moments or times. By enunciating this instability, the poem seems to begin at a moment that is both a culmination and a beginning – a transition.

For Felstiner, Alturas shifts Neruda’s poetic trajectory. The importance of reading and (in Felstiner’s case) translating this poem lies in the fact that it was written at the midpoint of Neruda’s career after two decades of varied and arduous evolution (p. 11). Felstiner’s translation seeks to balance the meaning and the emotions conveyed in the poetic language. In his book, Felstiner acknowledges and explains in detail the process by which he excludes and prioritizes using specific terms so that the poem can maintain its qualities in its English version. During this process, he compares other translations, biographical sources, and recordings and refers to people who may have been as close as possible to the author’s direct utterance of the poem. However, Felstiner does not comment in detail about the first canto, so his reading focuses on the first stanzas’ dark aspects. He says that: “(…) the beginning of Alturas de Macchu Picchu is pervaded by loneliness, thwarted passion, disintegrative forces, and death” (p. 12).

Nevertheless, Felstiner acknowledges the presence of erotic elements referring to a lost paradise, so for him, Neruda “thinks of penetrating to some progenitive source beneath earth and ocean” (p. 157). Now, my interest lies in considering these fecund elements in their proximity to economic practices that depend on the extraction of mineral resources. I consider that there is not only an association between the semantic field of sexuality and the myth of the golden age or lost paradise. Neruda is questioning the extent to which these practices, values, and semantic realms are associated. As will be seen below, this section of the poem conceptually organizes a division between the symbols of an agricultural economy that are different from those based on the production of metals. This division is as old as the founding of the independent republics in Latin America. The notion that metallurgical economies represent decadence as opposed to the progress that only agricultural development can provide has been widely studied.⁴

However, in Neruda’s poem, the association that Felstiner identifies has an ideological substrate. The idea that eroticism is essentially reproductive has characterized a series of discourses on what are nature, bodily functions, and biological determinism associated with certain currents within environmental studies. These associations are not alien to Neruda’s critique because, as Santí says, the prophetic character of his poetry is close to the notion of Christian notions of futurity. However, Santí’s project and Felstiner’s do not intend to recognize the Christian and Marxist tensions of Neruda’s poetry. What is relevant about these associations between Christian and Marxist ideas in the text is, on the one hand, the fact that while, Neruda, as Santí says, “carried Marx over from theory to poetry, he fashioned not simply a political tract but a peculiar kind of prophetic text” (p. 181).

On the other hand, the conceptualizations of the prophetic text as one that conveys a message sent by someone else and as the text that conveys something that has been seen or revealed to the poet suggest that Christianity is informing Neruda’s poetry. However, the relationship that Felstiner identifies between the erotic evocations in the poem and the myth of the lost paradise links these semantic fields beyond an ideological dispute. The poetic voice is prolific about certain materials that become symbols and are used in the text when the poetic voice is making these tricky associations.

Progressing with the poem, I would like to continue reading the last two lines of this first stanza. In these, the poetic voice speaks of the greatest love (translated by Felstiner as “the fullness that love”). This love can be that of a mother, a divine and spiritual love, or a lost but reciprocated love. Without specifying what kind, the poetic self says that this great love experience is also part of the experience that he had of the atmosphere of Macchu Picchu. Although the voice does not specify whether this love is part of the series of previous comparisons, within this atmosphere of temporal exchanges lies the value of this image. The interaction between these epochs makes arriving in the city comparable to saying goodbye (or leaving behind) in the second verse. However, the act of surrendering or leaving is also part of the series of comparisons in the stanzas due to the use of simile. Everything that is in motion in this stanza is a donation, and it is also a loss. The giving, or that great love, alludes to the same instability as the spring and advent of autumn. Like the ripe grain, the giving of that long moon refers to fertility. By how it falls, the movement described evokes a tear and the sadness accompanying the farewell. However, this movement is a donation referred by the poetic voice to great love, so that the object that falls and gives itself is also semen, in the sense of seed or origin.

The second stanza is entirely in parentheses and has three moments in which a sentence concatenates with the following one through a colon. Thus, I read this stanza as a single long sentence with three subordinate sentences articulated by an opening or explanation. The stanza goes as follows:

(Días de fulgor vivo en la intemperie De los cuerpos: aceros convertidos al silencio del ácido: noches deshilachadas hasta la última harina: estambres agredidos de la patria nupcial.) (vv. 7–11)

(Days of live brilliance in the storm Of bodies: steels transmuted Into silent acid: Nights raveled out in the final flour: Battered stamens of the nuptial land.)

In the first part of this stanza, the parenthesis is indicating a consolidated time or epoch, different from the present of the poetic self and the rest of the stanzas. In that time, the vitality of the bodies (referred to in the glow) is also evoked in the sonority of the word intemperie. The poetic voice characterizes the atmosphere of that time with a joyous vivacity. However, the colon that ends this sentence shows that the temporal fracture persists. Therefore, in addition to representing fracture, the colon introduces another function of metaphor in the poem. The poetic voice says that these glowing bodies are, then, like steel in their hardness, but they have been transformed and converted through smelting. Thus, the poem includes the common tropes of the lost paradise and the myth of the golden age, but here, the discourse constructed by the poetic voice resorts to images belonging to the field of metallurgy. In addition, comparing these bodies with steel is part of the poetic self’s confrontation between the present and the past. The conversion of which the poetic voice speaks replaces, through the mention of acid, the set of experiences associated with physical pain. Doing so generates a causal relationship between the moment of the melting (or subjectification) of the bodies and the end of the epoch of vigorousness. Both times would then be confused in the city’s atmosphere, from where the poetic voice can perceive all these signs.

In establishing the relationship between bodies, steel, acid, and colonization, the poetic voice says this conversion occurs in silence. The mention of a lack of sounds implies that this process is a conversion that concealed its development. The poetic voice in these lines evokes the incorporation of the indigenous subjects into the colonial system and marks that moment as the end of a paradisiacal era. That incorporation and the end of that time are not sudden events. Like the material transformation of natural resources to make them useful, the city’s decay is slow and quiet. Therefore, these verses add an element to the motifs that make up the poem so far. This element would be the silence that announces that the poem does not tell the story of a cataclysm. The poem describes the agony of a culture with a rhythm other than calamity.

After the previous lines, the poem goes on to say, after another colon, that those days of brilliance, those converted steels, are: “nights raveled (deshilachadas) to the last flour” (v. 10). The motif of change or confrontation between two epochs appears here as an antithesis between days and nights. However, that motif is a variation in the allusions to mineral, textile, and agricultural economies. The steel and the textures of fabrics and wheat products refer to the historical process narrated in Alturas. The poetic voice tells us that there is no longer a particle that refers to that seductive, dynamic, and vigorous pre-Columbian era. And finally, the stanza concludes with the last metaphor that poeticizes, between parentheses, the antagonism between these cultures and their times: “battered stamens of the nuptial land” (v. 11). The stamens, which are a phallic section of a flower, allow the poetic voice to allude to colonization as a process analogous to mutilation. The allusion to the European political and economic domination over the Inca territory (as a castration) generates a parallel, or a chiasmus, and an antithetical relation with the allusions to fertility, reproductivity, and vigor that appeared earlier.

This parenthetical stanza recalls elements that symbolize Andean pre-Columbian cultures in our contemporary popular culture. The poem begins by confronting these epochs, while the poetic subject sings about the passage through the streets of an unnamed city. Although it has a biographical referent, this memory allows the poetic self to produce a transition between his present and the past in which a rupture emerged. This rupture generates, in turn, two different temporalities – a past, still prior to it, which was utopian, and a more recent past that refers to the decadence of the city that made it remain isolated.

My interpretation reveals other presences that, for Felstiner, were secondary. The third stanza of the first part of the poem incorporates the presence and perspective of someone else. It reads:

Alguien que me esperó entre los violines Encontró un mundo como una torre enterrada Hundiendo su espiral más debajo de todas Las hojas de color de ronco azufre: Más abajo, en el oro de la geología, Como una espada envuelta en meteoros, Hundí la mano turbulenta y dulce En lo más genital de lo terrestre. (vv. 12–19)

Someone expecting me among violins Met with a world like a buried tower sinking its spiral deeper than all The leaves the color of rough sulfur: And deeper yet, in geologic gold, like a sword sheathed in meteors, I plunged my turbulent and gentle hand into the genital quick of the earth.

Regardless, this third person has no voice. Although its presence duplicates the glances or perspectives that compose the poem, the same poetic subject enunciates its story. For Santí, this person is an unfolding of the poetic voice (p. 127), yet the poetic subject transmits hearsay. More mysterious is that the relation between them in these verses is not specified. Nor does he say if he has arrived late or if there has been a reunion. He only states that this person waited for him between violins. Indeed, this waiting refers to a suspension in time. For this to be so, the violins must be understood as a symbol of Eurocentric culture. The poetic self perceives the other person framed by the hints of neoclassical and baroque styles. The violin, when assigned the function of a symbol of the culture of the metropolis, seems to reveal that, although this person has no name, he is another poet or writer on a metaphorical level. So, this stanza consists of a dialogue between the poetic self and a person embedded in a humanist tradition.

The poetic voice tells that this person found a world similar to a spiral tower buried deep in the earth. The poetic voice evokes the feeling of depth, employing a metaphor that substitutes the act of descent for the ambiguity of the leaves. Just as they can refer to the pages of a book and to that textual tradition to which the anonymous third person can belong; the leaves are also those of a tree. The poetic voice emphasizes this ambiguity by saying that the leaves are sulfur-colored but also hoarse (Note that I argue a more accurate translation is needed because rough does not necessarily mean what ronco is in Spanish). They are not only the leaves that fall during the autumn, nor only the pages of an old book; but if the metaphor was not enough for this poetic voice, he also brings synesthesia to this verse. Although it has a characteristic yellow color, sulfur evokes a distinct aroma. If that aroma is hoarse, the poetic voice gives another reason to underscore the use of synesthesia in this part of the poem. In this way, these verses compose a depth that is not only perceived with the eye, but also with the sense of smell and hearing.

The poetic voice appears to point out the literalness of its own words: the tower, spiraling, and referring to a whole world (an epoch with its episteme), which has acquired a suggestively phallic dimension, buries itself in the earth until it reaches the geologic gold (v. 16), but before getting there, the poem has another colon. Is it limited to only one possible reading in this case? The colon, as seen above, can string together a series of metaphors, replacing the function of the verb to be. If this usage applies in the case of verses 15 and 16, each corresponds to two different grammatical sentences.

Nevertheless, the colon can also expand the previous idea. That is, the gold of the geology would be the ground in which the spiral tower is burying itself. If we read the colon as a mark of continuity and not of fracture, these verses show the contrast between two different registers of the same experience. I appeal to both readings of the colon. Insofar as the message of the verse refers to finding something valuable in a substratum, both the third person and the poetic self are making a transhistorical comment on the slogan “drill, baby, drill.” They are both witnessing an extraction. In the past, the underground was valuable because it retained gold in its literal sense. What is underground is valuable for the poetic voice because it is seminal. He manages to sink his own hands into the most genital layer of the earth. That genitality, like the earlier references to fertility, is erotic as it refers to the production and reproduction of life. It is as valuable as a mineral because of how it is found. This positive approach to gold reproduces a cultural value associated with gold that promotes its extraction. Likewise, he equates the finding of a cultural material whose value resides in the fact that it is submerged (in a figurative sense); but that matter, unlike gold, has importance for the poetic self because it condenses the concepts that he has been associating in the previous verses with the vitality of that utopian past.

The world is like a spiral tower, and the hand wrapped in meteors appears in the poem as elements external to the terrain they penetrate. The mention of the tower fulfills the function of being the object that, by its similarity, can illustrate an inverted world that seems to bury itself. The hand of the poetic self is, for its part, wrapped in meteors. In this sense, the two phallic objects in this stanza are intervening in a territory (or world) into which they enter to find objects of value. However, it is unclear from this stanza whether these acts that form an emplacement and an exploration correspond with the duplicity of gazes. The stanza also functions as a chiasmus in which the elements of the first part (before the colon) correspond with the elements of the second part. However, the meaning of punctuation is hard to define. Therefore, although the possibilities of interpretation remain open, it is on purpose. The grammatical coincidence in both usages reveals that the mention of gold affects the referentiality of language. It does so by commemorating a painful past and celebrating and participating in the practices of that world.

The fourth and last stanza of the poem’s first part concludes the setting and locating the poetic voice of Alturas. The stanza reads:

Puse la frente entre las olas profundas, Descendí como una gota entre la paz sulfúrica, y, como un ciego, regresé al jazmín de la gastada primavera humana. (vv. 20–23)

I bent my head into the deep waves, Dropped down through sulfurous calm, And went back, as if blind, to the jasmine of the exhausted human spring.

The first part of the stanza expands the series of metaphors that closed the previous one. To summarize the line of associations that structure my reading, I assert that the poetic voice has described how the encounter with the city leads him to penetrate the center of that world. Then, he recognizes that that city was inhabited by a community subjected to a foreign production system. The center of that community, or its substrate or essence, consisted, for the poetic voice, of a set of values that embodied the ideal of vigor, fertility, and vitality. Since the system implanted disabled those bodies, that world remained isolated or inaccessible. Furthermore, this first canto ends by comparing the encounter of the poetic self with a lost place and time to the act of submerging into the deep waves.

Namely, the poetic subject marks a departure from those past practices. Although he participates in an analogous action at one point in the canto, he ends this part by differentiating his present self from the past time and what others have seen. The poetic self does not bury himself, and by metonymy, it associates with this earthly act a set of events that constitute the process of colonization that led to the extinction of a dominant culture. By submerging himself, the poetic self generates a variation, which implies that, although he sees how the consequences of this historical process remain, his intermediation is not a reproduction. Although that process persists in the thanatological representations of descent and sulfur, the present in which the poetic voice sings is another.

Nevertheless, he preserves the conventional symbols of an infernal descent. In a literal and raw sense, the stanza would say: “I descended like a drop among the sulfuric peace” (v. 21). It is no longer like a meteor sword that he enters the ground and its figurative equivalent, history. The poetic self now enters a liquid field, like a water drop, almost unnoticed and seemingly inconsequential. In this case, a drop is an antithesis to the images with which the poetic voice has described the conquest and colonization of America. This antithesis means that, in turn, the subjectivity in which the poetic voice seeks to categorize itself is also different from that of the subjects who exercised extractive practices in the past. Finally, that drop has an advantage because of its small dimensions. Unlike the sword, the trembling hand, or the spiraling tower, the drop can reach further. By resembling this little thing, the poetic voice can encounter a time even more inaccessible to everyday memory. He says he went back to that time, blinded as one who sees the light for the first time after living in a cavern. He calls that era “the jasmine of the exhausted (or better, worn out) human spring” (v. 22). It is not only to the almost pre-discursive season that the poetic voice arrives or returns, alluded to in the springtime of the first lines. In the final verse of the first canto of the poem, the poetic voice refers to the jasmine flower. The evocation of its scent, its singular qualities that make it stand out above other flowers, places it in the same category as other equivalent elements in the poem. Like the geologic gold, the genital layer of the terrestrial, the battered stamens, and the ripe grain, jasmine is a phallic object that symbolizes the lost vital force. After going through all those layers of history, memory, and dirt, like hoarse sulfur-colored leaves, the poetic voice seems to know, and experience contact with a utopia.

11.4 Conclusions

The representations, icons, or symbols used to make the concept of nature intelligible impact people differently than EV. Nevertheless, these symbols, icons, or representations interpolate the readers. The elements that structure the poem are embedded in a discourse that reproduces different forms of violence based on a binary conceptualization of gender. While the poem advocates for a more harmonious relationship between humans and nature, that relationship necessarily increases fecundity. In other words, even if the poem defends a conscious behavior of production and consumption and sees the past as a possible referent for the present, the text uses images of abundance and reproductivity framed within a heteronormative logic on which the modern capital logic relies. Therefore, even if the poem defends nature and questions the mode of production that leads to its destruction, it does so by creating a subjectivity that it cannot name and rejects. Therefore, it is possible to consider how the poetic discourse subverts and reproduces a dominant discourse around what is natural or not for a human body to do.

These subversions become evident in the first canto of Neruda’s poem when a proposed vision levels the dichotomous relationship between nature/culture. For example, in speaking of the human spring, the poetic voice refers to a past in which, in colloquial terms, things were better for humans. The poetic voice uses terms referring to metallurgy and agriculture to symbolize two contrasting relationships between humans and nature. Likewise, in this song, a symbol can be evidenced that alludes to establishing a developed culture that conceals the possibility of making this return. However, this culture is also the means that allows us to perceive the existence of that past. In this way, the poem proposes that a harmonious relationship with the environment can restore the lost vitality of human beings.

Nevertheless, the mention of gold in the poem shows that the poetic voice assumes the positive valuation of this mineral as a desirable raw material. Therefore, although a cultural subversion depreciates the metallurgical processes associated with extractivism, the poem maintains a traditional view of using non-renewable resources. Although gold has a metaphorical function that alludes to an original era, this function is only possible within an extractive logic. The metaphor loses its meaning if gold does not have cultural and economic value.

In Neruda’s poem, both approaches meet and are in tension. On the one hand, the poetic voice laments the effects on the population of incorporating a production technique associated with a change in the cultural values attributed to gold. But on the other hand, the poetic voice maintains the cultural value associated with the material itself. Thus, the poem assumes a stable meaning for “gold.” However, it denounces the harmful effects of the change in the mode of production. Thus, the fracture generated in the relationship between nature/culture through the development of technique appears in the poem as a process that harms the very corporeality of the subjects. The introduction of this technique marks the beginning of the phenomenon of extractivism. Although the use of the category of gender as a biological determination is questionable, it is through this use that the poetic voice can denounce the historical continuity of the mode of production.

The concept of EV proposed by Marcantonio defines it as the direct or indirect damage experienced by human beings because of toxic or non-toxic pollutants released on the planet by human activities (p. 26). This concept allows us to understand the associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. Among the components that make power preserve the vulnerability of populations in regions directly affected by EV, the cultural factor plays a supplementary role. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how gender and sexuality, as categories that are part of what is culture (as well as race and class, for example), and how they are represented, are part of the cycle in which production seems to be incompatible with the stability of our environment. Latin American literature has a long history of representing nature and its relation to humans, mediated by a symbolic understanding of gender.

When we approach a text like Neruda’s, the equation is complex as it preserves a dominant vision of how a harmonious relationship with nature should look. Then, it is also possible to consider how these discourses in literature affect specific populations while promoting increased production and consumption. In other words, even if Neruda longs for a broken relationship with nature, it also assumes that abundance and fecundity are the signs of a more responsible mode of production.

The longing for that lost past is motivated by the recovery of a lost vital force associated with virility. For this reason, when the terms of metallurgical smelting are used to denounce the damage that these activities generate in a population, paradoxically, a hostile gaze on non-normative bodies is also reproduced. The poem, in this way, suggests that such bodies have been emasculated and have lost their masculine symbolism as an effect of environmental damage. Seymour says that the concept of nature has been employed as a prescription for the categories of sex and gender (pp. 4–5). Considering that the poetic voice constructs the image of the emasculated body as a symptom of environmental damage, one must consider to what extent such a figure functions as a scapegoat. The poetic voice laments the loss of this virility, but to what extent do we assume this symbolic representation of the emasculated body is an effect of environmental damage?