Cooperation, Land Use, and the Environment in Uxin Ju: The Changing Landscape of a Mongolian-Chinese Borderland in China (original) (raw)
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In this essay, I: (a) criticize the current political strategy of most environmentalists, both radical and moderate; (b) propose the intellectual terms of a political alliance that could overcome the traditional political separation between conservative and progressive when dealing with the environmental question; (c) report on a case; (d) suggest how to shift from a non-political situation into a political and institutional action. My goal is to create a political-cultural background which brings together both environmentalists and those who are inspired by new economy, cultural creatives, wikinomics, organic farming, cultural and immaterial consumption models, etc. The new alliance will be grounded on a new covenant between humans and nature, and on a non-materialist interpretation of politics. Therefore, I call for new research that helps to radically change the political and the production system, not because it is unjust in the usually considered terms, but because it endangers both nature and society. By changing the priority order I do not deny the importance of social justice and individual freedom in everyday life. Rather, I think that meaningful political reforms and consistent political platforms will be possible if we place the relation between humans and nature at the beginning of political debate.
Politics of nature: East and West perspectives
Ethics & Global Politics, 2011
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in ecological issues among thinkers concerned with cosmopolitics. Here I wish to offer a slightly different perspective on the politics of ecological issues by adding two lines of reasoning to the topic: one of them from my original field, science and technology studies, and the other from what I have called the anthropology of the moderns. To begin with, speaking about a 'politics of nature' might appear simultaneously strange and obvious, terribly new and terribly old. On the one hand, that 'nature' in relation to ecological issues has become increasingly present in the political agendas of rich and poor nations is obvious to anyone who cares to read the newspapers. But nature has also entered the political realm in another and more troublesome sense. Until recently, we have been in the habit of saying that while politics is about conflicts, power struggles, ideologies, emotions, inequalities, and the distribution of resources and wealth, the turn from politics to the natural realm meant a move from endless conflicts to certainty, from human centered passions to object centered reason. This is no longer the case. What has happened in the recent past is that issues about natural entities*tigers conservation, the monopoly over rare earths, dam constructions, the planting of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) cotton, genetics of race, alternative energy sources, and so on and so forth*no longer play the role of calming cold reasons, but have become some of the hottest topics of public controversies. It is as if nature and geopolitics had been conflated. We only have to think about last year's climategate or the recent shaky deal in Cancun over nonbinding CO 2 reduction to witness a political controversy about a formerly natural question: that of the climate itself. And yet, what could be further away from political
Human Geography, 2012
This essay: (a) criticizes the current political strategy of most environmentalists, radical and moderate; (b) proposes the intellectual terms of a political alliance that could overcome the traditional political separation between conservative and progressive when dealing with the environmental question; (c) reports on a case; (d) suggests how to shift from a non-political situation into political and institutional action. My goal is to create a political-cultural background which brings environmentalists together with people inspired by new economy, cultural creatives, wikinomics, organic farming, cultural and immaterial consumption models, etc. The alliance will be grounded on a new covenant between humans and nature, and on a non-materialist interpretation of politics. Therefore, I call for new research that helps to radically change the political and the production system, not because the system is unjust in the usually- considered terms, but because it endangers nature and soc...
Journal of Political Ecology -- Special Issue on Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies
The articles in this special section, by offering ethnographically grounded reflections on diverse strains of economic activism, begin to articulate a non-capitalocentric political ecology that we think can help scholaractivists politicize, reimagine, and recreate socio-ecological relations. In this introductory article, we offer a useful vision of how scholar-activists can engage with and support more just and sustainable ways of organizing human-human and human-environment relations. Specifically, we argue that engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, and desires that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations. Each article in this collection attempts one or more of these goals, and this introductory article provides a conceptual grounding for these ethnographic studies and a synthesis of some of their primary contributions. We begin by describing why critique is analytically and politically inadequate and explain why we think a non-capitalocentric ontology offers an essential complement for engaged scholarship. We then turn to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective in order to explain how ideas of overdetermination, diverse economies, and performativity better equip the field of political ecology to contribute to alternative futures. And finally, we discuss how the articles in this volume reconceptualize values, politics, and scale in a manner that illuminates our scholarly and activist efforts.
Land in Revolt: Ecocriticism and the Roots of Resistance
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2018
This article examines the politicization of natural resources like water and land, and broader entanglements of environments and politics, in Egyptian cinematic imaginaries. Youssef Chahine’s narrative film al-Ard (The Land, 1969) addresses the politicization of agricultural land during the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser (1954-1970) and the British colonial occupation of Egypt (1882-1956). Because histories of colonialism and nationalism in the Arab world are rooted in the economic and political exploitation of material resources (including land, water, and people), I turn to ecocriticism as a method of critical reading to analyze the film’s depictions of these configurations of political power and resource management. I argue that al-Ard roots its depictions of the Egyptian peasantry’s resistance in environmental concerns, namely restrictions to resource access and peasants’ affective relationships to land. By tracing these imbrications, I relocate environmental concerns within scholarship on political resistance in Nasser-era cinema.
This study uses concepts of power and 'scaled politics' to analyze the effects of environmentalization and technocratic and market-based measures in China. Political scientists have explored the politics behind the proactive engagement of the Chinese state in governing the environment since the 2000s, also drawing on political ecology. Based on policy document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates a case of ecological resettlement in Inner Mongolia by examining how this became a new solution to desertification and rangeland degradation. The article shows how resettlement was implemented through multi-scalar practices and the reconfiguration of spatial relations, and why pastoral households responded to resettlement in certain ways. The state turned certain areas and people (associated with overgrazing) into subjects of governance. By distinguishing the different strategies used by central and local government, the analysis shows that disciplinary and neoliberal environmentality are associated with scalar practices between the state and the people, and within the state system. Neoliberal environmentality, however, counteracts the making of environmental subjects and encounters resistance. Sovereign environmentality is still deployed as a means to control local government and the obedience of herders. Pastoralists resist this, depending on their different subjectivities. The study advances our understanding of the multiple governmentality perspective, its analytics, and scalar processes. Les politologues ont exploré la politique derrière l'engagement proactif de l'Etat chinois dans la gouvernance de l'environnement depuis les années 2000. Cette étude utilise des concepts de pouvoir et de «politique à l'échelle» pour analyser les effets de l'environnementalisation et des mesures technocratiques et fondées sur le marché en Chine. Basée sur l'analyse des documents de politique et le travail de terrain ethnographique, l'étude étudie un cas de réinstallation écologique en Mongolie-Intérieure en examinant comment la réinstallation est devenue une nouvelle solution à la désertification et à la dégradation des parcours. L'article montre comment il a été mis en oeuvre à travers des pratiques multi-scalaires et la reconfiguration des relations spatiales, et pourquoi les ménages pastoraux ont réagi à la réinstallation de certaines manières. L'État a transformé certaines zones et personnes (associées au surpâturage) en sujets de gouvernance. En distinguant les différentes stratégies utilisées par le gouvernement central et local, l'analyse montre que l'environnementalité disciplinaire et néolibérale est associée à des pratiques scalaires entre l'État et le peuple, et au sein du système étatique. L'environnementalité néolibérale, cependant, neutralise la fabrication de sujets environnementaux et rencontre une résistance. L'environnementalité souveraine est encore déployée comme un moyen de contrôler le gouvernement local et l'obéissance des éleveurs. Les éleveurs y résistent, en fonction de leurs différentes subjectivités. L'étude fait progresser notre compréhension de la perspective de la gouvernementalité multiple, de ses analyses et de ses processus scalaires. El ámbito político detrás del compromiso proactivo del Estado Chino en el gobierno del medioambiente desde los 2000s y efectos posteriores, ha sido explorado principalmente por la ciencia política que nunca ha utilizado conceptos similares a los de ecología política (EP), tales como poder y escala. Este estudio se basa en ideas sobre diferentes formas de poder y el campo político a escala dentro de la ecología política, para analizar los actuales procesos y efectos de la ambientalización en China, para así, profundizar en nuestro entendimiento de la política crucial detrás del acercamiento neoliberal respaldado por medidas tecnocráticas y basadas en el mercado. Con base en el análisis de documentos normativos y trabajo etnográfico, el estudio investiga particularmente un caso de reasentamiento ecológico en Mongolia interior. Esto, con una mirada hacia cómo el reasentamiento se vuelve una nueva solución para la desertificación y la degradación de los pastizales, cómo se implementa a través de prácticas multi escala, así como hacia la reconfiguración de las relaciones espaciales, y por qué los hogares de pastores respondieron de ciertas maneras a este reasentamiento. Los hallazgos sugieren que la visibilidad de las tormentas de arena fue tomada en cuenta con efectividad por parte del Estado para convertir ciertas áreas (el área fuente) y cierta población (asociada con pastoreo excesivo) en sujetos de gobernanza. Haciendo distinción de las diferentes estrategias entre los gobiernos central y local, el análisis identifica que el ambientalismo disciplinario y neoliberal, está asociado con diferentes prácticas escalares entre el estado y la gente, así como dentro del sistema de estado. El ambientalismo neoliberal sin embargo, contrarresta la formación de sujetos ambientales, mismo caso de la resistencia del ambientalismo de verdad. El ambientalismo soberano es aún implementado como un medio efectivo para forzar al gobierno local y a los pastores a la obediencia. La resistencia varía entre los hogares de pastores con base en sus diferentes subjetividades, más frecuentemente resistiendo a la formación de agentes modernos, que a la formación de agentes ambientales. El estudio anticipa nuestro entendimiento de una perspectiva de gubernamentalidad múltiple, su analítica y sus procesos escalares.
AH 522 Political Ecologies: Perspectives on Nature, Place, and Heritage
"What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political Ecology!" Bruno Latour (Politics of Nature 2004: 1) "Gravel —an aggregate formed by water— became the likely inspiration for this book, a collage of concerns about the ways intersect with nature in the arid Southwest. The humble gravel pit offers an entrance to the strata of place, suggesting some fissures in the capitalist narrative into which art can flow. " Lucy Lippard (Undermining, 1-2) We live in very unusual, disturbing times. Debates on the onset of the Anthropocene (the new proposed geological epoch), climate change, and the global environmental crisis have brought to attention that we are at an important turning point in history of the planet earth, while in many places communities are increasingly denied basic rights to their environment, including access to water, land, clean air, biodiversity, and heritage. The social movements of ecological resistance experienced at the Dakota Access Pipeline, or during the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia, or the construction of the Merowe High Dam in the Northern Sudan, or the Sardinian resistance to the construction of a national environmental preserve speak to us as various local ecologies where the interests of global capitalism, nation states, and the indigenous communities come into conflict. Political ecology is a rapidly growing field of research and political platform concerning the place-based activism in coming to terms with development projects, extreme resource extraction, military conflict, and the other effects of globalization and late capitalist world order. This graduate seminar will investigate key contemporary debates in and fieldwork methodologies of political ecology through the perspective of humanities and the arts, with a special focus on nature, place, and heritage. These three concepts remain at the core of artistic, literary, and architectural engagements with the environment in recent history and will form the main threads of discussion within the seminar. Case studies will feature examples of threats over architectural and natural heritage at sites of dam construction and resource extraction, destruction of archaeological and cultural heritage at sites of military conflict, genealogies of places and landscapes, debates on deep past and deep future, and ecologically conscious art practice. The primary objective of this seminar is to build collectively a new and innovative way of approaching the politics of ecology from the specific, creative perspective of the humanities and the arts. What is the challenge of ecology and global ecological crisis and local politics of the environment to the humanities and the arts? Political ecology has long been a cross-disciplinary field, and derived its strength from the multiplicity of fields taking part in it, such as political science, environmental sciences, human geography, anthropology of social movements, etc. But what would an explicitly humanities and arts approach to ecology look like? Moreover, political ecology also aims to create platforms of debate not restricted to academic discourse, but are open to dialogue to other stakeholders outside academia. How would one address the challenges of ecological conflicts in various places in the world through an arts and humanities initiative? These are the core questions we will attempt to address in this seminar.
BECOMING COMMON – ECOLOGICAL RESISTANCE, REFUSAL, REPARATION
2023
This chapter thinks through international law and posthuman theory by way of an example of ‘posthumanist commoning’. It explores the posthumanist and the commoning dimensions of the legal and political collective actions at hand. It does so by telling the story of the ‘insurgent lake’ of Rome – the ‘lago bullicante’. Bullicante is an archaic Italian term that signifies both ‘to boil’ (bollire) and ‘to get agitated’ (agitarsi). The ‘lake that boils and gets agitated’ refers to the artificial/natural lake that was accidentally created in 1992, when an underground parking lot was illegally constructed and inadvertently hit an aquifer, thereby flooding the construction site and nearby area, creating a one-hectare large lake in the heart of the city. With the lake, an insurgent political subjectivity emerged to resist and care for its preservation. Both the subjectivity and the struggle are articulated and practiced in non-liberal, non-individualistic, and in-human (or more and less than ‘human’) terms, thereby giving rise to a distinctive mode of ‘becoming common’. Drawing on the lago bullicante, I argue that this mode of ‘posthumanist commoning’ enacts particular practices of ecological resistance, refusal, and reparation. The transversal alliances forged within networks of transnational resisting collectives help exploring how posthuman theory can inform international law. It does so by availing methods of reconfiguring the categories of the human, the land, and its living ecology, while also revealing critical blind-spots and methodological/conceptual limitations of both posthuman theory and international law.