Keywords

Introduction

Over the past few years, with a brutal global pandemic, worsening impacts of climate change, and dysfunctional governance across various scales, visions of an impending apocalypse have been proliferating. These coming end times are described by some to be the outcome of destructive human–nature relationships; others see it as the Earth, a superorganism, resetting itself, bringing back equilibrium, beginning a new age, and for yet others, the apocalypse can be averted, if only our institutions listened to the opinions of those attempting to foreground the needs of nature and the Earth in our politics (Awuh et al., 2021; Bosworth, 2021; Fine & Love-Nichols, 2021). These views shared and re-shared on social media platforms, headlined in media cycles, and spoken in fear and frustration remain oblivious to both the beginnings of the apocalypse and how human–nature relationships underscore many kinds of humans, many kinds of natures. Such a plurality is starkly absent from mainstream environmentalism and climate action, which remain tethered to Malthusian overpopulation scenarios, usually in the majority world, authoritarian protectionism through conservation policies and climate adaptation/mitigation projects predicated on visions of “pristine” nature, and ecological stewardship rules which nominate the individual as the critical and thus fail to hold accountable the powerful machinery of the market and state alliance (D’Souza, 2019; Kashwan, 2013; Tindall et al., 2022). Echoing similar sentiments, Zoe Todd asks:

What does it mean to have a reciprocal discourse on catastrophic end times and apocalyptic environmental change in a place where, over the last 500 years, Indigenous peoples faced (and face) the end of the world with the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions? What does it mean to hold, in simultaneous tension, stories of the Anthropocene in the past, present, and future? (2016, ¶5)

In the following chapter, inspired by the work of indigenous, feminist, anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti/de/post-colonial thinkers and doers, we consider Todd’s critical question and interrogate the problematic roots of modern, mainstream environmentalism and its role in supporting certain visions of the Anthropocene. In doing so we propose a reorienting of our epistemic and political frames. Our intention is to highlight the myriad ways in which humans are entangled with the more-than-human beings that challenge environmentalism’s reductionist human–nature binaries, which act as a tool of enclosure, exclusion, and displacement. Additionally, such a reframing questions the value of the planetary scale within environmentalism as a discursive tool and an organizing device, while also acknowledging the material cleavages of a deeply unequal world. In doing so, we hope to highlight the plurality of relationships that need to be nurtured, to move from the ideological and material prison of hegemonic mainstream environmentalism (HME) and the just futures it promises.

Mainstream Environmentalism’s Problematic Past and Present

Environmentalism, or a series of practices and ideas to care for the more-than-human world of nature, is often seen as a modern movement, emerging as a response to the impacts of exploitative and extractive industrial development and natural resource management. However, environmentalism can also be defined as an ongoing exploration of viable human–nature relationships, which predates the beginning of colonial industrial state-building. But, to return to the former definition, an overt sense of “protectionism” runs like a throughline within most of the mobilizations surrounding environmental policy, planning, and ideologies within much of the minority world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This vision of a world on the verge of collapse due to humanity’s unregulated growth arguably rests on the establishment of the “scientific” ideals of the Enlightenment in Europe, its support of the vision of colonial human–nature management since the fifteenth century, and ultimately, the creation of an industrial global economy, trading in the labour and bodies of humans and more-than-human beings. Thus, environmentalism, as a modern global set of ideals and politics, solidifies post-World War II in the minority world. Along with the support of protected areas for conservation, as imagined and executed in the United States in the nineteenth century and inspired by colonial land management, environmentalism sought to address the exacerbating death and loss of biodiversity due to unregulated industry and the supposedly exploding human population which was nearing the limits of ecosystemic and planetary carrying capacities (Davies, 2020; Johnson, 2020).

However, given the plurality in ideological, cultural, and political positions, even within the minority world, environmentalism has stratified into several different avatars, coalescing around significantly different objectives and pathways to those objectives. These range from ecocentric ideas such as deep ecology to corporate environmentalism, which sees the capitalist free market as the best tool for planetary sustainability. They also include more authoritarian and violent ideas such as ecofascism, which rests on social Darwinist ideas of racial and ethnic superiority and the protection of such populations and their “nature,” violently, if necessary, against less suitable people. Finally, authoritarian environmentalism is an exclusionary process through which powerful institutions (often the state) can create and apply top-down policies to manage “nature,” irrespective of, and at times even against, the aspirations of impacted community members. Our framing of hegemonic mainstream environmentalism (HME) rests on the foundations of such ideals. First, it biases certain scales of governance, driven by the tools of colonial land management, instituting evaluation metrics that assess human–nature relationships, not for their ability to address the holistic wellbeing needs of a variety of communities and ecologies but for their ability to produce material and political assets for powerful elite institutions (e.g., the state, transnational corporations). Second, it attempts to explore and present human–nature relationships through a Cartesian, positivist lens, cleaving humans and nature into discrete autonomous units—artificially cleaving relational, entangled systems to often create oppositional binaries. Finally, third, it essentializes and romanticizes certain historical moments, advocating a return to such times as critical in restoring the equilibrium that is lacking in our current human–nature relationships. In this framing, the agency of both humans and nature is subsumed to support a narrative that can only exist when populated with caricatures, whose validity is tethered to the acquisition of certain elite political objectives (e.g., the trope of the noble savage, the presentation of pre-colonial human–nature relationships as the equilibrium state) (Bosworth, 2021; Lo, 2021; Mansfield et al., 2015; Smith, 2021). So, HME in many ways fails to address its colonial, authoritarian, essentializing overtures, which continue to insidiously motivate much of environmentalism and environmental policy. Here we want to make something clear: our use of HME in this text is only as a heuristic. We are not proposing yet another explanatory framing to distil and examine environmentalism. There is much ongoing scholarship and activism which addresses this issue. Our objective is to merely create a cohesive entity, which, we argue, encapsulates much of environmental ideology, policy, and activism in the world today.

The discourse and practice of HME in the majority world are quite variegated. In India, despite some recognition of communal land rights and decentralized institution building, the spectre of colonial forestry is still resonant, with displacement and evictions of forest-dependent communities, often along with caste/religious/ethnic differences, both for conservation and industrial development, a commonplace affair. In China, authoritarian environmentalism with state ownership of all land, and through it all of nature, often brings issues of social justice into collision with top-down environmental governance. In Kenya and Tanzania, fortress conservation to protect African wildlife from local Africans has led to the creation of heavily surveilled and militarized human–nature relationships for the benefit of the elite. In Brazil, the territorial aspirations of the settler state are juxtaposed to the international environmental organization “industry,” which consistently engages in power tussles with other land-use stakeholders, undermining the complicated and diverse political mobilization of indigenous communities. Despite such differences, some key common threads emerge in the manifestations of HME in the majority world. These include the discursive and material domination by elites within national environmental ideologies, policies, and management; patriarchal foundations of institutionally codified human–nature relationships leading to a flourishing of technocratic management; an importation of both environmental activism and environmental management techniques from the minority world and marginalization of place-based “environmentalisms”; and finally, a significant lack of focus on root causes of exploitative and extractive human–nature relationships, leading to a focus on crisis resolution through top-down tools, instead of understanding the historical structural inequalities connected to ownership, access, and management.

However, there are also ongoing challenges to this powerful edifice of HME. Many have emerged from indigenous resistance to a variety of political and managerial tools, attempting to further alienate communities from nurturing and responding to the many changes in their human–nature relationships. Others have coalesced around the marked exclusion of women from decision-making pathways, highlighting their unique relationships with more-than-human beings. Yet others have critiqued the omnipresence of shallow technical solutions, proposing that the care of the natural world and the wellbeing of communities cannot be treated as separate projects. Ultimately, questions of justice and equality are being foregrounded by many who believe that they serve as critical yardsticks by which to evaluate the health and future viability of our human–nature relationships (Agyeman et al., 2016; Nightingale et al., 2020; Schmidt, 2022; Tschakert et al., 2021; Zanotti, 2014).

Complicating such non-elite mobilizations is the discursive and material reality of climate change. The significant changes in global climatic patterns, especially related to temperature and precipitation, brought about by fossil fuel-driven industrial growth are impacting key human–nature relationships and social-ecological systems. Nevertheless, the unjust precarity experienced by marginalized communities and ecologies, both in the majority and minority world, making them more susceptible to changing climate and society trends, is a result of historic structural processes such as colonization, predatory capitalism, patriarchy, casteism, and techno-managerial state-building. Therefore, while the urgency enshrined in global climate politics, building on visions of a coming apocalypse, is seemingly responding to a common condition, it ends up homogenizing complicated climate–society relationships. Ultimately, critiques of HME identify similar concerns in planetary and state-scale mitigation and adaptation knowledge and policies and propose instead a radical reimagining of the Anthropocene. They push back its genesis to the advent of colonial conquest and reframe the ultimate objective as a reconciliation of historic injustices within the life of modern nation-states and the nurturing of social-ecological wellbeing at sub-national scales, through more than mere carbon management (Dalby, 2017; Jackson, 2020; Larsen & Harrington, 2020; Lorimer, 2012; Mathews, 2020; Simpson, 2020).

Given such a plural and at times contentious existence, challenges to HME exist in many forms across the majority world. In the next section, we explore a temporary conceptual frame, the goal of which is to provide a habitat for our rendition of a variety of environmentalisms emerging parallel to HME.

Non-elite and More-Than-Colonial Environmentalisms (NEMCE): A Temporary Frame

Non-elite and more-than-colonial environmentalisms (NEMCE) is a frame we are using in this chapter to capture a whole host of ideologies and actions that challenge the validity of HME. Similar to HME, it is a heuristic device and, in this case, analytically employed to present two very different case studies, emerging out of very different intersections of colonization, state-building, and communal agency. Our choice of words to describe these environmentalisms is deliberate and is predicated on two considerations. First, in recent years there has been a burgeoning of “decolonial” scholarship, and such “attempts” at decolonization have appeared across multiple disciplines, institutions, political mobilizations, and collaborations. However, indigenous-led decolonization advocating for an end to the settler-colonial project and the return of material and political control to communities historically battling colonial violence and erasure is very different from the emergence of settler and white scholars wielding the ideological and intellectual premise of decolonization in the ongoing culture of appropriation, focusing on rhetoric rather than material relations. This trend is problematic when decolonial thought and action seem to be led by minority world institutions, racially privileged scholars and activists, and ethnically/culturally dominant elites from the majority world. Adequately examining the tussle at the heart of decolonial praxis is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, the problematic connotations of the word and also its existence adjacent to other terms like post-colonial and anti-colonial have inspired our choice of using the term “more-than-colonial.” For us, more-than-colonial is a term rooted in hope and in the possibility of relationalities, ideologies, and materialities that extend beyond the colonial imaginary. In doing so, we also support the claim that it is impossible to “extract,” “sever,” or “eliminate” the many vestiges of colonization, since our communities and ecologies have emerged from the colonial encounter. Instead, by invoking more-than-colonial our understanding is that human–nature relations and environmentalism, even though formed of certain colonial elements, can and do become more than the sum of their parts (Curley et al., 2022; Halvorsen, 2019; Hope, 2020; Mollett, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Zanotti et al., 2020).

Second, given the very different experiences of socio-cultural and political hierarchies in the majority world, terms like racism, sexism, or ethnic and religious othering don’t often translate across space and time. Therefore, to signpost existing power structures without essentializing the experiences of different communities, we are using the term “non-elite,” which contains multitudes, doesn’t nominate a certain kind of discriminatory process, and allows us to navigate across a variety of socio-ecological relationalities (Campbell, 2012; Gergan & Curley, 2021).

In this next section, we explore the three foundational “habitus” of NEMCE. These are emerging from multigenerational and multispatial encounters between marginalized non-elite communities and the hegemonic processes of the state-science-market triad. While not all these encounters challenge the edifices of HME, their complicated presence reveals the messy, unfinished-yet-generative attempts by a variety of agents to support certain place-based human–nature relationships. In doing so they repoliticize and pluralize environmentalism (Accetti, 2021) and highlight the inability of elite discursive and material tools to understand and ultimately extend allyship to the spectrum of human–nature relationships (Thomas, 2015; Whyte, 2020) (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1
A Venn diagram has interconnected color gradient circles of domesticating capitalism, challenging algorithmic thinking, and plurinational placemaking.

NEMCE at work

Full size image

NEMCE as a culture of practice is almost impossible to categorize or articulate without getting discursively hijacked by the essentialist tropes that HME itself is mired in. However, witnessing a variety of mobilizations across the majority world (both through our engagement with communities and a review of ongoing projects), we notice three emerging processes (see Fig. 6.1).

Domesticating Capitalism

Supporters of market-based solutions to address “environmental issues” remain fiercely (and even violently) opposed to more anti-capitalist discourses and mobilizations, and vice versa (Borras et al., 2021). However, many non-elite mobilizations seem to be pursuing tactics which attempt to “tame” or “domesticate” the extractive overtures of capitalism, while also wielding it to achieve their own political goals. We see such mobilizations in the Pacific, where indigenous economic development, pursued through a diversity of socio-culturally embedded practices, is defying extractive surplus distribution pathways. Instead, through building upon existing fluid relationships between various human and non-human agents, economic enterprise, practised by certain indigenous communities, is enabling a possible move from appropriation to circulation of surplus value and wealth (Amoamo et al., 2018; Vunibola et al., 2022). Another example is the Xavante indigenous group from the lower Amazon basin and Cerrado (savannah) regions of Brazil. Despite suffering both cultural/material genocide and territorial loss of their homelands, their strategy is one of “taming the waradzu (white man).” Currently, Xavante reclamation of frontier urban spaces, as a form of territorial control, through a variety of strategies complicates indigenous stereotypes. Their use of colonially constructed cultural stereotypes to take back the control of local- and regional-scale economic activity from the settlers is a result of the colonial state’s historical failure at protecting indigenous sovereignty over territorial homelands, through protected area policies (Carrara, 2020; Welch & Coimbra, 2021).

Plurinational Placemaking

The limits of the nation-state, in the majority world, as both a representative of the diverse socio-ecological relationships it contains within its borders and the ultimate arbitrator and adjudicator of cross-scalar socio-ecological contentions have been well explored (Shawoo & McDermott, 2020). However, given the Euro-colonial world order, the state is here to stay. Nevertheless, through a variety of strategies, non-elite actors are challenging more monolithic state institutions, often pointing to the enduring elite control over such institutions across a variety of post-colonial spaces. Some of these challenges also incorporate a restructuring of intra-community governance, critiquing at once the vagaries of the post-colonial state and historical oppression by certain elite groups. We see such strategies underway in lower caste engagements with dictates of top-down land management policies in the Central Himalaya, in India. These strategies, while circumventing the increasing control of the state, often through the Forest Department, also defy upper-caste gatekeeping of communal land and institutions. A production and reproduction of human–nature relationships, while pursuing forms of extraction, similar to those of the elites, situates their actions within a historical throughline of material exclusion and severance from the land, both as a “resource” and as a “refuge” (Chakraborty & Sherpa, 2021; Sharma, 2022). We also observe such strategies in the “working-class environmentalism,” being led by indigenous and peasant organizations within the oil and agricultural sectors in Ecuador. While some have pointed to the problematic existence of “indigeneity” as a symbolic resource and an essentialized political tool, the construction of Ecuador as a plurinational state is emerging from such a diverse, at times contradictory realm of identity positions. The emergence of labour organizations which go beyond the traditional labour unions, focused more on worker rights and working conditions, to also address “environmental” concerns, is an example of non-elite visions of human–nature relationships which ground themselves in questions of ownership and use (Uzzell, 2021; Vela-Almeida, 2018).

Challenging Algorithmic Thinking

There is an increasing presence of digital environmental governance within the auspices of environmental policy making. This emergence is predicated upon the rise of GIS-based Earth information systems, predictive models of socio-ecological change, and the use of artificial intelligence to explore possible current and future trends (Machen & Nost, 2021; Nost & Colven, 2022). This proliferation of “algorithmic thinking” has been touted as an answer to the burgeoning “science denialism.” However, in the process, the hard-won battles of knowledge equality and justice, legitimizing knowledge production through indigenous, local, feminist methods, have been undone. Challenging such “science imperialism,” a variety of non-elite actors are mobilizing, fighting for both the utility of their knowledges and the creation of a system of accountability to address the extraction and misuse of renditions of their human–nature relationships by members of the scientific establishment. We observe such challenges in the horizontal and plural knowledge production initiatives across the majority world, especially in regard to exploring transforming climate–society relationships. These include knowledge co-production, with the Waorani in Ecuador (Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2021), with the Sherpa in Nepal (Sherpa, 2014), with the Maasai in Tanzania (Goldman et al., 2018).

Taken together the three processes above present a powerful response to HME. They highlight its insidious reproduction of certain elite subjectivities, ideologies, and institutions, while claiming to support planetary visions of ecological wellbeing and through them social sustainability. However, we also acknowledge that the construction of NEMCE itself is an act of essentialism, an attempt to subsume a multitude of relationships under the auspices of a category, held together in most instances by its positioning as an alternative to HME. Additionally, we think, it is deeply problematic to claim that non-elite environmental politics is merely reactionary, and non-elite subjects are combative counterweights to the whims of powerful HME actors. This is why we refer to the NEMCE heuristic as a temporary one, its existence contingent on its conceptual utility, and we hope it is replaced by more inclusive and effective representations of non-elite aspirations.

Beyond Hegemony: Some Aspirational Conclusions

As we consider NEMCE and its abilities to decentre HME, we begin with a provocation. A provocation that others have arrived upon as well and at this juncture allows us to bookend our argument. We think the planetary focus, the scalar bias towards a global future, or for that matter, past, and a search for international harmony and dare we say, peace, inadvertently (or intentionally) undermines the many lives of NEMCE. The Anthropocene is included in this mix as are more seemingly progressive mobilizations such as Earth jurisprudence and more ecomodernist ones such as Sustainable Development Goals. Over the past few centuries, the modern nation-state has emerged as the fundamental spatial, cultural, and ecological unit of our planet. It can be argued that our planet is inherently visualized as formed of international relations. In this hegemonic planetary mythology, and it is hegemonic, the plurality of human–nature relationships is consistently held hostage by the material and cultural aspirations of that national spatial organism. Is the solution then a spatial dissolution, a global “meltdown of borders” releasing both sovereignty and belonging from what currently exists as a powerful national imaginary? However, the imbalances of power within our nations predate their formal establishment. How would those relationships endure in a post-national planetary order? We don’t really have the answer to this question and accept that the aspirational and the possible, while intertwined, can exist together, albeit in different forms. Embedded within a planetary body organized as such, what is the role of NEMCE?

First, it serves to rupture the various ideologies that are vying for political space to control the present and future of human–nature relationships. This advances through the dismantling of identity categories like “peasant,” “indigenous,” and “environmentalist,” and also spatial categories such as “household,” “village,” “tribe,” or “nation.” In examples of domesticating capitalism which seem “unenvironmental,” non-elite communities at once subvert a legal system which remains tethered to discrete notions of identity and spatial categories and serve to reward those who align most with such categories. This encountering of the essentialization of non-elite agency is necessary when working towards just futures. Additionally, indigenous inclusion in land management is increasingly observed as moments of plurinational democracy in action, through a successful weaving together of techno-managerial science and indigenous knowledge. The inclusion, we think, should catalyse around the human–nature relationship and its dynamic manifestations, having passed through a colonial rite of passage, and not be driven by the seeming directives of almost a rights-based approach to the institutions of the modern settler colony (Holst, 2016; Kashwan, 2013; Kvanneid, 2021; Laing, 2020).

Second, it calls out the artificial (and farcical) construction of strife between the quest for social justice and the needs of “ nature.” In recent scholarship highlighting the differences between the colonial co-optation of the political project of decolonization and the indigenous-led mobilization to decolonize, Curley and colleagues state that “native, settler, slave—these are categories that are posed in both powerfully effective and troubling ways—they may provide crucial starting points in understanding how white settler enslavers set the terms of the game against liberation and sovereignty. If we take them up too easily, however, might they reify and entrench settler-enslaver truths and bind us in relation to one another in ways that make it difficult to imagine and enact abundant futures?” (2022, p. 1056). A similar politics is at work (and play) in the ideological construction of a scarce planet on the brink of collapse and the actions of the non-elite, the most vulnerable, and a justifiable act of survival, which inadvertently enables the apocalypse (D’Souza, 2019; Whyte et al., 2019). Narratives of scarcity and humanity’s reach past planetary boundaries, yet again, echo a scalar obfuscation. The life of the state is transposed on the life of the non-elite human and more-than-human agent and their many entanglements. How is this just? Furthermore, within the discourse of HME, the aspirations of non-elite communities are side-lined, replaced by a combination of an anxious response to the Anthropocene and the machinations of a political bloc, organized around the idea of “protectionism,” vying for power over land, against the neo-extractive march of the settler state (Anthias & Radcliffe, 2015; Klenk, 2004).

Ultimately, NEMCE challenges a discrete global environmental ethic/science/policy and through it a master mythology of human–nature relationships. Instead, it proposes place-based mobilizations deeply rooted in spatio-temporally relevant injustices, whose goals don’t have to be sacrificed for the promise of some imagined planetary future. The human–nature relationships emerging from very situated spatio-temporal encounters cannot be organized within a vision where scales are additive and higher order inferences can be drawn by extrapolating such situated encounters across space and time. NEMCE provides a key alternative to HME visions of planetary wellbeing—the human–nature relations being nurtured at one scale, spatio-temporal unit, place, whatever you want to call it, do not have to adhere to the aspirations of some grand narrative. Neither does the discomfort of encountering a pathway to equality and justice, which extends beyond what the state can offer, insinuate some internal collapse, and point to the victory of the apocalypse. Because, the truth is, for many non-elite communities the apocalypse has already happened, and they survived, and they are still resisting. Their politics resonate with a hopefulness which is in stark contrast to the anxiety now palpable in HME.