Rethinking Code's Approach of Ecological Thinking from an Indigenous Relational Perspective (original) (raw)

This paper argues that different cultures and their respective knowledge systems should partake to the sustainability debate. The focus is on insights that indigenous knowledge may provide, analyzing the principles which oversee indigenous relationship with nature, like reciprocity and caretaking. These principles move from a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness, and put emphasis on the importance of giving back to nature. They offer an alternative perspective on sustainability that challenges the Western view. Such a view is still focused on maintaining the possibility of exploitation, and embedded in a sense of separation from nature. The paper discusses the need of creating a laboratory for sustainability, i.e. a genuinely pluralist space in which multiple cultural expertise can interact and mutually enrich, yet maintaining their distinction and integrity. The main motivation of such an endevour should be to redefine the notion of sustainability in a more refined and thoughtful way: this is something vital for present and future generations.

It could be said that any field ofpractice that cannot or will not critically examine itself is at the mercy of and limited by its own blind spots. This paper systematically uncovers the mechanisms and implications of this assertion within the field ofIndigenous' sustainability to show that sustainability, and reconciliation between Western and Indigenous worldviews, are fundamentally spiritual matters. It first demonstrates how Eurocentric thinking and land use practices have been unsustainable and in conflict with Indigenous thinking and land use practices from the outset, and then deconstructs the oxymoron of'sustainable development' and the pleonasm of'Indigenous sustainability' to illustratehow unexamined cultural assumptions, with their imbedded ambiguities, are carried into policy and practice. This deconstruction supports the thesis that, as a primarily spiritual issue, sustainability needs to focus on promoting ontological change, as a prerequisite priority over, and pathway to, facilitating exterior structural change. Finally, this article explores how Western rational objectivity censors the spiritual and is thus pivotal to unsustainable living. It concludes with examples of'huge questions' elicited from such unsustainable dynamics, and consequently proposes a practical focus for new approaches to sustainability that incorporate Indigenous spirituality.

What may be achieved through taking up the complex exploration of nature, land, and sustainability is a growing field of inquiry in both science and social science, particularly for those who are interested in the local environment. Meanings of nature, land, and sustainability have been either misunderstood or misrepresented within disciplinary boundaries in many Indigenous communities. To explore the meanings of things such as nature, land, and sustainability in Indigenous communities, we as researchers had better first acknowledge the spirituality and local experiences that connect one actor with other actors. A relational ontology is the conceptual framework within which I suggest meanings of traditional land, nature, and sustainability such as traditional experiences, culture, and customs, are important issues for Indigenous lives and environment. This framework may potentially guide the researcher through the critical concerns of identifying the problems of existing land, nature, and sustainability management in relation to the everyday land-based practices and traditional experiences in Indigenous regions.

Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of humanity can live sustainably or resiliently. Yet it is rarely acknowledged in many literatures that for Indigenous peoples living in the context of settler states such as the U.S. or New Zealand, our own efforts to sustain our peoples rest heavily on our capacities to resist settler colonial oppression. Indigenous planning refers to a set of concepts and practices through which many Indigenous peoples reflect critically on sustainability to derive lessons about what actions reinforce Indigenous self-determination and resist settler colonial oppression. The work of the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation (SDI) is one case of Indigenous planning. In the context of SDI, we discuss Indigenous planning as a process of interpreting lessons from our own pasts and making practical plans for staging our own futures. If there are such things as Indigenous sustainabil...

Overview With her latest book, Ecological Thinking: The politics of Epistemic Location, Lorraine Code proposes naturalized epistemology to effect nothing less than an epistemological sea change equivalent to Kant's " Copernican revolution. " 1 We recall that Kant disagreed with the underlying core epistemological principle shared by his modernist contemporaries' competing rationalist and empiricist theories: that knowledge conforms to the nature of objects. Instead, in what is sometimes termed a " Copernican revolution, " Kant stood this conception on its head, arguing that objects conform to our ways of knowing; that our mind, infused a priori with the faculty of reason and thus capable of accessing and applying similarly a priori " fixed laws " is actively involved in creatively synthesizing and categorizing knowledge, and is not merely a passive recipient of experience. 2 Through her new epistemological framework of ecological thinking—not, as she insists, yet another epistemology in and of itself—Code envisions reconfiguring in all its aspects Kant's modernist epistemology, which she characterizes as predicated on masculinized principles of mastery (over " nature, " knowledge, each other, the self), an epistemology through which the undifferentiated-interchangeable, neutral-objective, rationally-autonomous, self-realizing individual (S, in S-knows-that-p) synthesizes universally accessible and universally justifiable knowledge (p). Her revision of Kantian epistemology—what she claims has become the dominant epistemology of modern times, through which knowledge is deemed worthy of the name exclusively on its empirical-scientistic justificatory status—includes reforming the hegemonous instituted social imaginary which sustains and is sustained by Kant's master narrative and its knowers, into an instituting social imaginary of ecological thinking. Code proposes the latter as an imaginary of negotiated, rather than " given " hegemonic empiricism; of embodied, socially-morally-politically situated knowledges and knowers: interdependent, socially constructed 'second persons' rather than radically autonomous individuals who offer disembodied views from nowhere and everywhere; of knowers located " on the ground " within an ecosystem , where the specificities of their ecological location suggest the necessary normatizing principles to guide them