Ecological Relations: Towards an Inclusive Politics of the Earth

Ecological Relations International relations traditionally theorises the relationships between different groups of peo...

Author: Susan Board

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Ecological Relations

International relations traditionally theorises the relationships between different groups of peoples, normally bounded by nation-states, regarding access to territory, resources and markets. In so doing, it ignores the fundamental ecological foundation to these interactions and ensuing relationships. In the current climate of environmental degradation, the discipline of international relations should recognise this basic deficit. By broadening the term ‘relations’ to incorporate an ecological understanding, international relations can be approached from this changed perspective. In this book, Susan Board uses a Foucauldian model of power to expand the boundaries of international relations. She argues that ‘relations’ can include other people or animals, and are not exclusively between states. Such a perspective acts to denaturalise the marginalisation of women, animals and indigenous peoples and hence to expand the constrained discipline of international relations. By rethinking the model to put ecological foundations first, we are pushed to think and act with consideration of the long-term sustainability of the global environment, and this ecological focus reminds us of our interdependence with our environment and all our neighbours. This book raises conceptual and methodological issues that go directly to the heart of current critical engagements within the discipline of international relations. As such it will be of great interest to students and researchers in international relations, environmental politics and political theory. Dr Susan Board teaches politics and international relations at the University of Sussex.

Routledge Innovations in Political Theory

1 A Radical Green Political Theory Alan Carter 2 Rational Woman A feminist critique of dualism Raia Prokhovnik 3 Rethinking State Theory Mark J. Smith 4 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics Beyond pessimism of the intellect Anne Showstack Sassoon 5 Post-Ecologist Politics Social theory and the abdication of the ecologist paradigm Ingolfur Blühdorn 6 Ecological Relations Susan Board 7 The Political Theory of Global Citizenship April Carter 8 Democracy and National Pluralism Edited by Ferran Requejo

Ecological Relations Towards an inclusive politics of the earth Susan Board

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 Susan Board All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Board, Susan, 1966– Ecological relations: towards an inclusive politics of the earth / Susan Board. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social ecology. 2. Human ecology. 3. International relations. I. Title. HM861 B63 2002 320.5–dc21 ISBN 0-203-16423-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-25837-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–24966–X (Print Edition)

2001048111

For Sensei, Daisaku Ikeda

Contents

Acknowledgements

1

ix

Introduction

1

The exclusivity of international relations

9

IR and international relations 9 The fixed epistemology of IR 11 The legitimating praxis of political philosophy 12 The masters of the metaphysical assumptions of politicisation in IR 13 The methodology of naturalisation 21 IR and an ecological perspective? 23 Concluding the epistemological exclusivity of IR 26 2

Understandings of an ecological perspective

36

The history of ‘ecology’ 36 Ecological perspective as paradigm? 38 Ways of articulating an ecological paradigm 40 Elusive nature: the difficulty of politicising an ecological paradigm 43 Re-orientating values 45 Shall we paddle or dive in? Theorising upon an ecological perspective 48 Conclusion 57 3

System building and ‘game openings’: seeking an inclusive attitude for excluded ecological relations Missing the relations: understanding discourse from the exterior or archaeological perspective 71 Political rationality: power, knowledge, right – discourse 72

67

viii

Contents The production of the subject 80 Finding the relations: genealogical exegesis and the hold on the subject 83 Ethos as prelude to political praxis 86 A methodology for an ecological perspective of IR 89 Conclusion 91

4

Ecological relations: the case of women

97

The objectification of women: life, language and labour 101 The ‘dividing practices’ 112 Becoming a subject 118 The power of the subject 126 5

Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals

138

The objectification of nonhuman animals: life, language and labour 141 The ‘dividing practices’ 145 Becoming a subject 152 The power of the subject 162 6

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples

177

The objectification of indigenous peoples: life, language and labour 179 The ‘dividing practices’ 189 Becoming a subject 195 The power of the subject 206 Conclusion: towards an inclusive politics of the earth

227

Index

237

Acknowledgements

This book is an abridged version of my doctoral thesis, written at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth between 1995 and 1999. I am thankful for financial support from the Department of International Politics, which enabled me to pursue this project. I am also enormously grateful for the open attitude to critical work fostered at the department. Most significantly, I would like to mention my supervisor, Roger Tooze, whose consistent encouragement inspired my confidence with this ‘wacky’ project. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the anonymous referees for Routledge whose positive comments made this publication a possibility and to thank Routledge for their patience. I would also like to pay tribute to valued friends whose support and company have sustained me over the years: Beverley Shann, for living so passionately and forthrightly her politics; Erica Wallace, for her boundless good cheer; Jo and Dominic Bourton, for wonderful hospitality and warmth in Hereford; Laura Robertson, for joyous vacances; Sandra Beckett for her generosity of spirit; Neil Stammers, for his kindness, and many more besides. As always, the last mention is for Ben: for being the most remarkable and understanding 8 year-old son.

Introduction

International Relations (IR) is traditionally theorised from the grounds of a socially constructed metaphysics that logically excludes recognition of the ecological framework to life. What if we were to instead theorise from the ground upon which we walk? What if we were to accept the term, relations, in its broadest sense, rather than in its inherited understanding of diplomatic dealings between representatives of states? A perspective acknowledging both the ecological contextualisation to political life and the unlimited potential of relations between subjects would both confound the bound nature of the discipline and respond to the urgent need to address the consequences of environmental calamities and global disparities. Such an expansive reading of politics would necessarily reach for sustainable solutions alongside the discipline’s founding normative goal of seeking peace. This book is an exploration of the possibility of articulating such an inclusive politics. This is done by adopting a framework that incorporates an awareness of the power relationships held by subjects whose locations within diverse ecological contexts matter. Such a reading involves the appreciation that nature is not divorced from human affairs but that humanity is part of the earth’s ecosystem and has had and continues to have a significant, usually detrimental, impact upon the earth’s ecosystem and other inhabitants. The approach adopted here takes as presumed that the levels of economic activity, material consumption and subsequent waste produced currently within the ‘developed’ world are unsustainable. The holism involved in an ecological vision of the affairs of earth contrasts with anthropocentrism, that is, a human-centred view of political debate. Accordingly, there is a distinct difference between the defined parameters of debate in IR and the approach adopted here. Both the academic discipline of IR and international relations as practised are concerned with relations between states regarding issues of war and peace, trade and levels of human autonomy. An unquestioned premise is the centrality of human life within an environment that may be used instrumentally. This anthropocentric metasupposition, axiomatically rooted in Cartesian metaphysics, logically distinguishes itself from and disregards the wider ecological sphere of relations. To view the world ecologically permits perception of human activity as

2

Introduction

merely one, though incredibly influential, interdependent constituent agent alongside that of other nonhuman spheres of activity, as well as perception of the mutuality of linkages between the vast diversity of life forms. Consequently, the prioritising of an ecological view subsumes an anthropocentric political perspective. This is particularly germane as it becomes increasingly manifest that the narrowness of anthropocentric epistemologies and the accumulative Baconian exploitation of earth’s lands, seas and sentient beings have devastating repercussions for humanity. We are daily reminded of our involvement in the ecological world as weather conditions oscillate between extremes and as the air that we breathe, our water sources and food-stuffs are cumulatively affected by toxic build-up.1 Furthermore, the steady depletion of diverse creatures and habitats2 is rendering human life on the one hand more self-important, and on the other hand, lonelier – cosmologically. Within the general term humanity, there exists a diverse range of epistemologies arising from differing locations and experiences. In the West an ‘addiction’ to an affluent standard of living is culturally entrenched, if not always achieved, which effectively overrides any attempts to reach for a sustainable way of living, in spite of the awareness of ecological deterioration. Indeed, the ‘double-talk’ of well-intentioned people whose radical rhetoric contrasts with their weak and insubstantial policy proposals is not uncommon; the concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ continue to rely upon the labour of disempowered beings, as they have done since early colonial expeditions. The driving power derives from and reinforces a culturally particular, monologist world-view, which causally advances the depletion of life and pauperisation of peoples.3 This singular, socio-culturally specific notion of power has been accorded metaphysical legitimation through longevity of reified belief. The result is a failure to act upon known observations and emotional responses to the devastation of the ecological fabric of life and diverse life forms upon this earth. The blind spot in IR to this fundamental epistemological construction, notwithstanding contrary philosophical insights from Hobbes and Rousseau for example,4 allows the persistence of policies that take for granted a hierarchy of life forms and a utilitarian approach to animate natural capabilities and capacities. Any environmental proposals advocating a different, less manipulative respect towards earth and beings epistemologically associated with the natural domain, such as indigenous peoples, women and nonhuman animals, cannot logically break away from this metaphysical foundation of ecologically oppressive relations unless the underlying epistemology is critiqued. The argument presented here sets out to demonstrate, via a range of previously disparate fields of enquiry and literatures – including political philosophy, ecological philosophy, environmental ethics, feminism, animal rights, anthropology and development discourses – the possibility of seeing the plurality of epistemologies that exist arising from the manifold diversity of geographical and socio-cultural locations. This is done by utilising a

Introduction

3

methodology found within Michel Foucault’s political philosophy that interjects an ethical responsibility to politicisation. Such an expansion of our political attitude is premised to introduce a less discriminatory, more inclusive political practice. Thereby, it is proposed that there does exist a way to open up IR to be integrally related to the diversity of ecological contexts. In order to discover the intractability of IR to an ecological reading, the argument starts with an analysis of the legitimating foundations of IR. Chapter 1 argues that IR is a discipline founded upon a selective reading of political philosophy that epistemologically delimits our understanding of, and ability to include, the ecological parameters of life and all assigned as of the natural domain. Political significance has been constructed as transcending anything concerned with the natural. Such naturalisation has then been presented as immutable ontological fact. The case-studies – women, nonhuman animals and indigenous peoples – have been selected on the basis of this factor; historically within political philosophy and hence political theory they have been regarded as universal categories of derivative political consequence, if of political worth at all, because of their association with nature. This is constantly reified within the academic sphere of political philosophy and the policy-making realm of international affairs whenever the metaphysical assumptions of theories being used are not critiqued. In fact, the norms of political praxis have been modelled upon a minority of beings living upon this earth. Epistemologically the diversity of life is reduced to that of a Western human male, which has very real politico-ethical effects on the lives of the majority of peoples, not to mention nonhuman animals. Chapter 1 traces this line of reasoning through philosophic texts foundational to IR and finds that attempts to incorporate an ecological reading of international politics are metaphysically constrained by binarist logics that divide the world and all within it. This contrasts with Chapter 2 where an ecological perspective is related. It is an attempt to provide an understanding of the vast range of literature advocating an ecocentric position, where the ecosystem is prioritised, as opposed to an anthropocentric position, where humanity is the prime focus of attention. Theoretically this perspective takes its cue from the inherent character of the global ecosystem, that is, a monistic entity within which dialectically interdependent relations reside. Socially constructed barriers to our knowledge of how to interact with the natural domain are inappropriate when humanity is perceived to be of the natural domain too. Therefore an ecological perspective cannot fit within IR theory if that theory is founded upon a metaphysical assumption of division between nature and the sociocultural domain of politics. Having revealed the constructed condition of IR, it is hypothesised that a different approach originating from the acceptance of the fundamental variety of actors within this biosphere may be reconstructed. Chapter 3 discusses the open attitude of possibility and immanent critique within the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The methodology discerned from

4

Introduction

his own summing up of his lifetime’s political preoccupation is found to allow for mobilisation of political consciousness and practical activity. Foucault recognised the tautological condition of the terms, political theory and practice; all is praxis. Further, his insistence upon the ethical responsibility of humanity to refuse constraining disciplines and to constantly struggle for autonomy at individual, societal and transcendental levels led him to experiment with given notions and terms. Thus, an adoption of a Foucauldian ethos enables the conceptual freedom to consider physical subjects beyond anthropocentric, androcentric and Western norms. So Chapter 3 describes the background to the discovered template that is utilised as a way of analysing the case-study chapters. This follows four steps of perceiving political subjects: first, it reveals the objectified nature of the subjects – their positions of entrapment as objects, the reification of this context through linguistic and metaphorical representation and their enslavement to this status accorded by their devalued labour. Second, the practices that so divide these subjects from the political realm are revealed – these may be epistemological constructions constantly reified as metaphysical givens and/or ontological facts, or, based upon a singularly narrow understanding, even ignorance, of others. The third step allows the reader to perceive the reversal of dichotomised social relations and the revolt of those previously considered to be objects, that is, the emergence of ‘new’ subjects – subjects who had always been present, but never up until that point been permitted to represent themselves as integral subjects. The final step recognises that the ability to define oneself as a subject and to act as a subject with political agency is still and always subject to mediation – that it is an incessant struggle, but that the struggle is worthwhile, since it brings to the fore questioning of boundaries and inclusivity. Indeed, it encapsulates the ethical responsibility that defines humanity. Further, the constitution of subjects is found to matter for power is embodied, whether in social structures or internalised within an individual, and thus may be manipulated. In sum, this methodology demonstrates the exegesis of new theoretical beginnings by allowing conceptual space for the theorisation of Ecological Relations. The succeeding case-study chapters analyse, according to this genealogical methodology, the power struggles to reformulate an epistemology that respects the particular ecological ontological contexts of the selected subjects, namely women, nonhumans and indigenous peoples. Chapter 4 discusses women’s subordination within political debate on the basis of our capabilities to give birth and nurture a child/children. This physical and emotional bond with the sustenance of life has been devalued and relegated to the realm of natural animalism. Further, when a woman chooses to work within the home and/or with the land to produce food-stuffs and materials for her family and community before producing commodities and/or crops for foreign sale and consumption she is marginalised within the global discourse of the market economy. The location of the majority of women within the private realm also secludes them from the public gaze. The philosophies that legitimise

Introduction

5

such metaphorical and actual positioning of women are revealed as misogynistic epistemological constructions, even when given ‘scientific’ legitimation. The third methodological step allows the reader to see the manifold uprisings perpetrated by women that, with pride, are informed by their social positions of powerlessness and particular ecological context. The final step allows us to recognise that women are as caught as any other subject within the struggle to define autonomy and also elude confinement. Chapter 5 discusses the problematic inclusion of nonhuman animals within politics. This is problematic primarily for two reasons: first, the arrogant presumption by humans, following a purely anthropocentric regard of earth, that nonhuman animals are naturally creatures of secondary significance and, second, the refusal to recognise that we are animals too and that animalism is a common characteristic of nonhuman and human life. Thus the first step of analysis describes the objective status accorded to animals. This has been given further credence, as seen in the second step, by the lasting importance of Baconian rationality and Cartesian philosophy that have informed knowledge and (political) practice. This legacy continues to legitimise the objective usage of nonhuman animals. The third step of analysis allows the reader to see that nonhuman life, whether as an individual being or collectively as a species, may be regarded as of integral subject status with innate worth. This independence of being, regardless of humanly conceived representation, is however, ultimately, found to be the nexus of a human conceptual struggle. The power to define and articulate those definitions is recognised to remain with humanity; however, this admission does not sanction those willing to participate to evade the ethical and ecological responsibility to include an awareness of nonhuman animals as valid relations with whom we share this earth. The final case-study chapter (Chapter 6) shows indigenous peoples as subjects worthy of inclusion within politics. Indigenous people have been portrayed as objects of political and cultural study on the basis of their material proximity to the ecosystem and lives of nonhuman animals, reverence for these organic domains (land, water-ways, mountains, forests, creatures, etc.) and animistic philosophies. In sum, the life-styles and belief systems of indigenous peoples are so culturally and linguistically alien to the norms of behaviour and belief accepted in the West that ignorance renders compartmentalisation of indigenous peoples as the ‘other’ the most simplistic defensive response. Thus, indigenous peoples are depoliticised. After describing the objective representations of indigenous peoples as circumscribed by the Western definitions of language, labour and life-style, the practices that so legitimate this divisiveness are revealed. Like the preceding case-studies, it is found that a Western monopoly on what to think and how to articulate choices excludes indigenous peoples as nothing more than objects of policy. However, the third step of analysis shows the reader many occasions when indigenous peoples have resisted their subordination by demanding and asserting their right to be respected as integral political

6

Introduction

subjects, without simultaneously losing their identity by conforming to Western ideals. Indeed, their political conviction is strengthened by their contextualised ontological and epistemological locations; they know that with regard to their local environment their knowledge matters because it is based upon personal experience and an ancestry of accumulated wisdom. However, when it comes to interacting with global forums or relating a local issue with the global economic system, it is recognised that outsiders may be needed. This is the power conflict found in the final step of analysis. It will be seen that each case study parallels the others, not only because of the same methodological treatment, but because each is interlinked metaphorically and actually into the same oppressive grid of discrimination. This is because the metaphysical root of politicisation, that has such real repercussions in life, is founded upon a dichotomous axiom of culture versus nature, whereby all encoded as of nature is outside the remit of culture and consequently depoliticised. The conclusion to the thesis emphasises the epistemological and paradigmatic limitations of traditional IR and stresses the need to regard relations in a more expansive and inclusive manner. Further, the prioritising of an ecological reading is highlighted in the search for a sustainable politics upon this earth. Indeed, it is suggested that IR is subsumed within an ecological approach to politics, but continues its normative goal of promoting peace. For by seeing afresh the interdependent flux and contingent stasis within which subjects reside, individually and collectively, we may theorise and admire the constant struggle of any of earth’s subjects to truly fulfil potential within particular ecological and socio-cultural contexts. This volume adds to the slowly emerging body of work that entreats theorists to reconstruct IR upon less exclusive, more tolerant terms. The inseparability of conceptualisations of nature and humanity is recognised to impact differentially and hold practical consequences that emanate from an axiomatic understanding of emancipation.5 By revealing the mutual interdependence of life on earth and therefore the need to focus upon relationships as well as subjects, we are led to reconsider locations within ecosystems as well as within socio-political systems. Thus theoretical discussion of whether to be modern or postmodern is transcended; instead, as a consequence, lives may be released from the disciplining practices dictated by the metaphysical ‘monolithic block’ at the core of Western society. To concur with Ulrich Beck, ‘social analysis must start afresh from its foundations’ and by association needs to rethink ‘the rules of the game’.6 This is particularly pertinent if the eclecticism of writings offering, or adding to, an ecological perspective is to contribute meaningfully to the debate. For not only are subordinated subjects raised conceptually and ideologically, but also by-passed epistemologies are brought into the fold. Hence, this multi- and interdisciplinary proposal to metatheoretically revise IR. Substituting the ‘International’ of IR with ‘Ecological’ immediately forewarns the reader of the conceptually revolutionary nature of the

Introduction

7

argument proposed without succumbing to the simplistic logic of reversing the polarity of the conventional Cartesian dualism. For the normalised praxis of positing as an object anything associated with the nonhuman sphere of consciousness and articulation, deemed to be devoid of intrinsic value, ensures a distinct conceptual separation of the subjective world of humanity from the surrounding ecological system. This cognitive binary epistemologically rules out the ability to perceive and analyse the interdependent flows of mutually constituting meaning and being. As such environmentalist IR theorists who epistemologically privilege ‘international’ rather than ‘ecological’ predetermine logically the inherited political epistemology and methodology of dismissing and/or constructing as objective matter the singular ‘issue’ of the environment. As Matthew Paterson says, by ‘starting from the other end, the environment, might suggest an entirely different logic to our enquiries’.7 By privileging the ecological, all factors of agency and parameters of influence associated with the natural and naturalised sphere of life on earth are foremost. However, a reversal of binary constructions assumes acceptance; this epistemological construction retains an illusion of ontological fact. Rather the construction needs to be dispelled for socio-political life takes place within the earth’s ecological system and however much it is disguised we, that is, humans, are part of the natural world. Thus by searching out the conceptual ‘space’ between the interlocking binaries that emanate from the fundamental premise of nature/culture, this proposal allows for the perception of the multiplicity of ontological forms and epistemological behaviours. An inclusive praxis-oriented politics is sought that parallels the plurality of life on this earth.

Notes 1 Seager, J. (1995) The State of the Environment Atlas, London: Penguin Books, pp. 28–29 and pp. 18–19: ‘More than a billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water’, and there are 10 million known water-related deaths per year (pp. 18–19). 2 It is guestimated that between one and fifty species (plant and animal) become extinct each day; Bell, J. and Pimbert, M. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid, The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. 3 Achterius, H. (1993) ‘Scarcity and Sustainability’, in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books, pp. 113–115. Also Shiva, V. (1998) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Totnes, Devon: Green Books in association with The Gaia Foundation. 4 Thomas Hobbes theorised upon the overwhelming human condition of war, propelled by fear, competition and ambition in a land of limited resources. Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented the fact that human communities inevitably despoiled nature and the passing of an Arcadian age of plenty. See Chapter 1 for further discussion of Hobbes and Rousseau. 5 Cf. Dickens, P. (1996) Reconstructing Nature, Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour, London: Routledge.

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Introduction 6 Beck, U. (Weisz, A., trans.) (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 5 and 12, respectively. 7 Paterson, M. (1995) ‘Radicalizing regimes? Ecology and the critique of IR theory’, in Macmillan, J. and Linklater, A. (eds) Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, London: Pinter Publishers, p. 216.

1


IR and international relations The academic discipline of IR has had a checkered history of relating to the practice of international relations. It emerged as a distinct branch of social science early this century in the wake of the pervasive societal depression and feeling of senselessness that the First World War engendered and has since evolved according to the atmosphere and context that political events have created.1 It could be argued that this reactive character of the discipline renders it susceptible to expansive reformulation from an ecological perspective. However, the current chapter will describe the determining influences that have defined the space in which we now participate academically. The exclusive epistemological and methodological parameters of IR are shown to be structurally inimical to adaptation to ecological principles and dismissive of ontological realities. On the other hand, recognition that international theories have failed remarkably, most notably in not predicting the collapse of the bipolar Cold War system, has induced theorists to question the convergence of the external environment with internal debates and to critique the underlying assumptions of traditional paradigms. Both viewpoints lead to a consideration of metatheoretical foundations, which is fundamental to post-positivist debate and has been said to constitute a ‘sea-change in the world of international political theory’.2 Such a ‘sea-change’ has loosened the traditionally close relationship between academic theorist and practical policy-maker,3 allowed for the passing of the era of empiricist-positivist methodology and introduced a period of intellectual ferment – all of which characterise the third debate within IR.4 These changes reflect methodological and theoretical transformations in the social sciences in general,5 allowing IR to continue to be characterised as ‘backward’.6 In opposition, it has been suggested that debate should re-focus around ‘matters of substance’.7 It is accepted that the existence of IR has been tumultuous, rendering the relationship between theory and practice problematic and inducing uncertainty regarding the subject matter of IR.8 As such the relationship between the academic discipline of IR and the world, let alone earth, has been tenuous and ambivalent.

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Indeed, the proliferation of theories has failed to actively halt the proliferation of actual violence.9 As Julian Saurin points out, it is precisely ‘because of these theories’ and the way that they have been constructed and legitimised as ‘normal’ that the marginalised of world society suffer.10 The tendency of IR theory ‘to be a discourse accepting of and complicit in the creation and recreation of international practices that threaten, discipline and do violence to others’11 is metaphysically entrenched in theoretical cognition. For this state of affairs has been constructed and reified to circumscribe the possible domain of the political and delimit the possible identity of a political subject.12 Since politicisation has been made such an exclusive concept, the injustice befalling the majority of the earth’s inhabitants is made nonpolitical and normal. IR, prima facie, is charged with the study of the internationalisation of the historical and cultural processes of socio-economic relations. However, the culturally-specific history of the philosophic tradition metaphysically supporting this separate academic field,13 risks hermetically foreclosing the discipline to non-Western realities.14 Furthermore, the inherited theoretical tradition of atomisation reduces the discipline’s ability to perceive both the relationships and the whole picture of individualised actors/agencies.15 Nevertheless, the label, IR, has generally been unselfconsciously kept, despite the ambiguous misuse of both terms,16 thereby accepting the particular ideology of this history.17 As Christine Sylvester has pointed out, this ‘field’ is constituted by ‘the absence of that which its title advertises – neither very worldly in its sense of the international nor very attuned to the range of relations that are often involuntary connections of identities and locales.’18 Indeed, within mainstream theory, the ‘international’ of IR does not entail epistemological ‘privilege’,19 and the term, ‘relations’, is reduced to official interstate affairs. These received understandings of ‘international’ and ‘relations’ – linguistic terms that have been reduced to a minimalist epistemology – determine a restrictive politics. Indeed, when juxtaposing the term ecological with international, the term, relations, is immediately exposed as arbitrarily narrow. For, as will be explained further in the following chapter, an ecological understanding of relations recognises an expansive circle of interdependent subjects, insistent upon the monistic quality of the cosmos. Thus it is proposed that there does exist a way to theorise ecological relations without simultaneously underestimating the legacy of the classical agenda, which claims ‘modern science’ as the arbiter of political philosophy. By conceptually rebelling against the imposed boundaries of IR that determine negligence of ecological relations, an opening for the practice of sustainable politics is also created. It is hoped that this approach entails more than a token attempt to include an ecological understanding of IR and its practice in its attention to the complexity or absence of political and ethical linkages underpinning theoretical frameworks.20


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The fixed epistemology of IR The theory and practice of IR is a mutually constitutive process. However selective the acceptance of this relationship between academic study and international events has been, it is contended that IR is receptive to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of the interdependent relationship society holds with earth. Currently, the dominant approaches within IR persist in implicitly harking back to the ‘discoveries’ of natural science from the sixteenth century and have minimal if any relevance to contemporary realities. Thus, the natural world is regarded as nothing more than a material base upon which rests the social world and arena for politics; yet, the myths and laws of the natural world may be appropriated or, at least, observed by political subjects for use as and when deemed appropriate. As a corollary, all agents and conditions socially constructed as beyond this political realm are naturalised as uncivilised, according to the presumed ethical and political superiority of an exclusive interpretation of humanity vis-à-vis the ‘natural’ realm. As a consequence, naturalised subjects are consciously determined to exist outside the discipline’s perspective and beyond the remits of politics.21 In simultaneously circumscribing political identity and the space for political inclusion, IR reproduces an exclusive reading of who may be included and where is important. Thus the political citizen is an adult male and the space is the state:22 ‘Trapped by this idée fixe, permanently self-referential and chronically insular, International Relations has become normatively and politically irrelevant.’23 There have been and continue to be calls to fill the vacuums of IR and allow the silences to be articulated, most notably in the field of gender critique.24 However, to continue this example, the marginalisation of feminist debate in IR25 and the subtle yet powerful elision of the term, gender, with ‘women’ means that the ability to perceive the political normalisation of masculine interests disappears.26 Thus, to effectively readdress the constitution of IR, there needs to be an awareness of the powers internalised within language and theory and legitimised philosophically by historical longevity which continue to be mobilised. The intellectual legacy that is integral to traditional IR theory is the embracing of natural scientific methodologies to understand the social world. This is the essential core of modernity. As such the questioning of ‘natural truths’ has become the preserve of postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of Western rationality and its command of the positivist method.27 Such post-positivist critique consists of a refusal to accept the abstraction of ontological, epistemological and methodological premises to IR theory but to search out their specific temporal and geographically contingent determinants and the powers that persist in reifying this state of affairs as immanent. Thus, sublimated political and ethical questions are brought to the foreground.28 Thereby the metaphysical presumptions of IR theory presumed to incorporate the world in the likeness of the Western, rational and sovereign

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man marching in civilised fashion towards an infinite telos are questioned. For such a ‘historically specific understanding’ of the site and identity of the political symbolises and reproduces ‘the limits of the contemporary political imagination’ within mainstream theories of IR.29 In so demarcating where is appropriate and who may be included, mental horizons are constricted. The discipline is thereby ‘defined by its own practices and in an important sense, trans-historical, totalizing and given’.30

The legitimating praxis of political philosophy The epistemological tradition of IR is further legitimised by a distinct reading of political philosophy. This is a reified reassertion of a continued line of reasoning from the Stoic philosophers of the polis, who found in nature an organising principle for political society, through to the discovery of scientific method in the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment rationale to civilise humanity’s progression from natural forces. Classical Greek philosophy looked to nature as a template for consideration of ethics and politics; natural science from the seventeenth century authenticated these classical limitations of human society. Pre-modern understandings explained the exclusive nature of politicisation and hierarchical structures of Greek society, by reference to observed phenomena regarded as immutable fact conceptually allowing natural science to become natural law. Nature was viewed in depoliticised, objectified terms yet became the normative foundation for human political life. Divisions in domestic society were justified on the basis of observed hierarchical systems in nature. This premise of natural science to politics was challenged with the advent of modern science and positivist methodologies. Instead of finding the legitimation of society within nature, science was harnessed to prove humanity’s power over nature. Human progression equated with transcendence over nature and utilitarian exploitation of natural resources. Thus nature became validated scientifically, through the efforts of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton in particular, and philosophically, by René Descartes, as objective matter conceptually distinct from the activity and rational ability of human subjects. This epistemological foundation to political theorising, however, only further elaborated upon the exclusive nature of Greek society as rationalised by Stoic philosophers; political society remained distinctly stratified according to natural(ised) laws. A classical historicisation of political theory is useful for the concepts and analytical methods ‘discovered’ which are given transhistorical, transcultural and transtextual significance; the mythology of eternal truths is historically and philosophically legitimated despite the temporal and geographic specificity of their origins. The evident ethnocentric and patriarchal epistemological foundations are subsumed as of original nature and become constructed as beyond critique, i.e., are made ‘common sense’.31 Accordingly, it is asserted that this unilinear and selective reading of philosophy as epistemological foundation to IR theory is ‘non-ideological’; its reification as ‘a


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powerful orthodoxy’ is confirmed by methodological privileging of positivist assumptions arising from the rationalism of European scientists from the sixteenth century.32 This trajectory complements more contemporary socio-historical description of the discipline of IR, based upon the proposition that actual events determine progression within theoretical analysis; the specific locations of theory determine its perspective.33 Yet, theoretical activity maintains the ability to refuse to see the origins of the practice of international relations because of its restrictive compartmentalisation of what counts as IR subject matter, methodological individualisation of empirical units of investigation and the assertion of ‘common-sense’ orthodoxy, all of which foreclose the ability to perceive the structure of relations.34 Furthermore, it is the widespread acceptance and selective adoption of these tales of progression of IR for presentist arguments of the state of the discipline that reinforces the limited cognitive scope of the domain;35 the socio-historic and philosophic lineage of the political theory of IR is perpetuated in contemporary tales of the discipline that persist in recreating naturalised patterns of exclusion. Indeed, every time this trajectory is implicitly or explicitly accepted, IR becomes genealogically locked into epistemological and conceptual exclusionary practices. In order to illustrate this tale of the discipline’s evolution, a number of the ‘self-selecting’ extracts of classical political thought found in a standard reader in international relations36 are analysed to reveal the cognitive hold of nature as an epistemological factor of political exclusion and of modern scientific logic to rationalise exclusionary political practices. Although developments within the discipline of the last century can be analysed according to a variety of approaches,37 it is only those methods that open up the possibility of questioning metatheoretical foundations that will loosen the inbred cognitive closure of IR. The chapter will now proceed to illuminate the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of political theory, which rest upon this historically specific and socio-cultural notion of nature and of humanity’s relationship with nature. The reification of epistemologies that normalise political relations between some members of society and define boundaries of exclusion has been convincingly argued by Walker.38 However, in order to establish the paradigmatic premise of naturalised dichotomisation within political philosophy, which has bequeathed its principles to IR theory, those political philosophical texts selected as foundational are analysed.39

The masters of the metaphysical assumptions of politicisation in IR The beginning selected is Plato’s Republic.40 Plato legitimises the hierarchical construction of political society according to the perceived location of justice, which is found to lie within the souls and, hence, inherent capabilities of individuals. This naturally variable capacity for justice provides the basis for

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different occupations. Thus, society is organised according to Plato’s tripartite classification of people on the basis of the constitution of their soul, which mediates the ability to reason. Since, justice is ‘sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of the State’, the state is perceived to mirror the individual;41 the state is the individual soul writ large. When the individual ‘sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master’ then will he behave and conduct affairs in a just and good manner. Thus is justice the connecting principle for both humanity and the state.42 Reason is needed to restrain the inherent chaos of earthly desires and is posited as a transcendent ideal. The innate differences within society are regarded as natural and as a corollary, the state is the product of the ordering of nature. Inequality is naturalised. The politicised individual is a free adult whose interactions with others in the state exist within a self-contained context of justice. Thus is political society bounded and natural laws marshalled to explain degrees of subjectivity. Reason, synonymous with its embodiment in the philosopher, who must participate in the government of the state, needs to constantly dominate base senses, just as the philosopher needs to control his personal feelings and material passions in order to focus upon the power of thought and seek justice for the community. Women are included in this analysis on the basis that ‘if the difference consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in that respect’. However, women are classified to become the wife of a man of her status43 and, thus, implicitly, secondary to their men.44 As for Plato wherein happiness is an outcome of justice, so too for Aristotle does personal happiness accord with public virtue;45 thus, conceptions of ethics and duties and notions of public and private are interlinked. Indeed, the Aristotelian view is that personal ethics should be foundational to politics. The two extracts selected as conducive to the understanding of IR concentrate upon Aristotle’s comprehension of the state and the ‘intelligence’ or ‘scientific insight’ required to apprehend the ‘eternally valid’ truths of nature, which constitute the basis of wisdom.46 Every state, whatever its organisation, is found to be the outcome of the ‘natural impulse’ to reproduce, resulting in a political society reaching for ‘some good end’. The state, as a natural evolution emerging from the coupling of a male and a female, is an extension of the family and, as such, the expansion of a community is reasoned to be a natural construction; ‘the work of nature’. Within this state ‘man is naturally a political animal’ on the grounds of his ability to reason and articulate that reason via speech. Nature, personified as female, is said to ordain a stratified society based upon a patriarchal and élitist bias determining endowment of superior reason. ‘She’ differentiates between male and female and between master and slave, but, ultimately, the interests of the society focus around the collective security of the state. Yet, the female and the slave are sociopolitically equivalent, that is, subservient and secondary to the free, adult


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male, on the basis of their natural indisposition to rule. Despite the genesis of the state, the individual and family are rendered secondary to the order of the state, for ‘the whole must necessarily be prior to the parts’.47 Since, according to Aristotle, the government is synonymous with the polity, which, in turn, constitutes the social life of the state, it is preferable for the political community to be largely composed of middle-class men, who are moderate in their desires and needs, unlike the poor and the rich. This coincides with Plato’s concern that philosophers should abstain from earthly pursuits that might provide unwelcome diversions. Thus is the state naturalised as beyond cognitive questioning of its socially constructed genesis and the norm of the political subject reified as an adult male. This foundationalist perspective is underpinned by a consideration of truth as being objectively present in nature, to be grasped through logical deduction by those who are mentally capable. Since reason is the preserve of man, only men are capable of finding in nature the principles for civil society. Moreover, only years of practical experience in political affairs will enable a wise person to be prudent, that is, make decisions in the interests of the community. Since politics is practical, being ‘a matter of action and deliberation or policy’, those intelligent persons who have amassed experience in decisionmaking are regarded as the best possible politicians.48 Thus only those who govern are regarded as political subjects; all other members of the social community are inferior and external to political regard. Indeed, man’s ‘natural’ relation to politics had only metaphorical connection to the organic natural world – conceptually built upon his transcendence from it. Those, whose lives, by necessity, retained a linkage with nature, were reasoned, by male decision-makers, to be too irrational to participate in the polity. Thus the concept of nature is used dualistically and creates its own dichotomisation: to authoritatively explain a division between peoples which is respected by those with political might who extol it, and to find itself set up in opposition to the polity so that all those peoples associated with it, are logically deduced to be outside the polity, that is, of secondary political significance. Therefore, although nature is the cosmological and metaphysical origin of all social life, epistemologically it becomes objective matter that may be made knowable. This process was reached by applying intellect, which originated from the soul. The aim was the pursuit of truth, thought to be objectively knowable, by both Plato and Aristotle. Further, building upon this individual pursuit, theorisation of rationality was an organising principle for social life. The embodiment of the soul was seen to be the causal feature of a subject; the natural body was said to be matter. However, since it also has a soul, and the actuality of life, the body is subjective ‘form’.49 This understanding of the indivisibility of soul and body as the defining feature of the human subject constituted the essential core of Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy. The acceptance of Bacon’s inductive method of compiling objective phenomena and/or Cartesian dualism, that is, the conceptual distinction of body

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as matter from the soul in modern philosophies provides a sharp point of departure from Socratic theory. The essentialist approach to nature in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics came to an end. Yet its legacy remains in the ambivalence accorded to the naturalised objects of Baconian and Cartesian study. Although Francis Bacon considered himself ‘particularly well equipped’ to write political theory, it is interesting that he is remembered as the ‘father’ of modern science and, in particular, the inductive method, rather than as a political and/or social philosopher.50 Yet, Bacon’s Novum Organum represented the arrival of a new form of epistemology that determined Western thought in the modern era. The technique of accumulating empirical data to further human understanding depended upon a prior acceptance of the instrumentality and objective matter of nature. The impetus of such science was the betterment of human society. This, alongside the view that scientific knowledge could subdue and harness the unruly, natural world, became ‘an anthropological certainty of European humankind’.51 Both the ethos of domination and the concept of nature as foundationally problematic, because unruly, became epistemological foundations to political theory in the modern era as is manifest in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, all regarded as pivotal to the understanding of IR theory.52 The fact that these theorists are, once again, like the above philosophers, European, gives the discipline a distinctively ethnocentric character that feeds through to the discipline still, since it is an essential component of the discipline’s genesis. As in the writing of any theory, the pervasive socio-political environment of the era leaves its mark. This particular period is characterised by the advent of state-sponsored science, and hence the coupling of political power with scientific discourse. Francis Bacon is not infrequently credited as the architect of this modern move53 that differed from the pre-modern rationalisation deduced from naturalistic premises. However, nature still informed notions of human progress and ideas of governance, for it persisted as a conceptual base for evidence of man’s mastery over and control of its energies and resources, providing a marker for the degree of civilisation. Thus the epistemological division between the natural domain and the political realm became scientifically entrenched. The Greek understanding of nature as being objectively discernible was also philosophically rationalised by René Descartes, whose dualistic logic of subjectivity versus objectivity posited the ability to think in opposition to the preserve of the irrational. The philosophic distinction between objective matter, which may be grasped by the senses, and the subjective faculties of humanity to perceive and rationalise upon these objects was made fundamental by Descartes’ Discourse on Method. In distinguishing the essence of humanity as the thought process, physical substance and other external things, were dependent upon the subjective nature of thinking to be known. This logic that ‘the intelligent and the corporeal nature are distinct’ wherein


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‘all [social] composition is a sign of dependence and dependence is manifestly a defect’ was found to emanate from the superior nature of God and was proven by analogy with the existence of geometry.54 Thus the natural world was divested of subjectivity and cognitively reduced by humans according to the subjective process of thought to irrational and unfeeling mechanism. This process of epistemological constraint enabled control of nature for the advancement of human society, in much the same way envisaged by Bacon; such a practical philosophy . . . would show us the energy and action of fire, air, and stars, the heavens, and all other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, and could apply them in the same way to all appropriate uses and thus make ourselves masters and owners of nature.55 Thus was the control and use of nature philosophically and politically legitimised based upon the metaphysical, dualistic separation of the human realm of reason and subjectivity from the irrational material, objective world, namely nature. In such a way was the Aristotelian thesis of the essentialisation of humans as natural usurped and the Cartesian division of the world instigated to epistemologically legitimate political practices of division. Such a socially constructed manipulation of reasoning advanced a specific political philosophy of naturalised dualism and a practice of divisive politics. For the philosophic mind–body dichotomy was translated into social organisation, on the foundations of Platonic and Aristotelian constructions of nature. This epistemological prioritising of the domain of rationality coincided with the Baconian domination of nature for the moral imperative of mankind to attain civilisation and the Newtonian ‘discovery’ of the causal ordering of nature. Yet since the conceptual base of this epistemology was nature, the metatheoretical foundation to the epistemology itself absorbed the constructed dualism of nature–politics and was presented as beyond politics: ‘natural’ logos. Although Hobbes was an associate of Bacon, and corresponded with Descartes, he objected to their philosophic findings.56 Thomas Hobbes can be regarded as an intermediary between Classical Greek political philosophy and modern treatises. Despite his self-avowed claim to be the original political philosopher,57 he implicitly accepts the tradition, inherited from Plato, Aristotle and others, that nature provides the conceptual base for social ordering. According to Hobbes, the laws of nature, which bestow only relative equality among mankind, are found to be also the ‘law of nations’. These laws, divined by God, are only discernible through the application of reason. Since humanity is naturally predisposed towards selfish means, yet lives in a state of constant fear due to the inherent equality of human capabilities and residence within an environment of limited resources, these laws are ordained to bring about a state of peace of which mankind has the mental capability

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to know. However, Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature meant that for humanity to prosper in a society of peaceful co-existence, power needed to be centralised within a sovereign, the Leviathan, which all subjects would fear and obey. Fear of violence, coupled with the absolute primacy of self-preservation, impelled the imposition of this authoritarian rule, the Leviathan, a cultural power to control the dangerous forces inherent in nature. Thus, Hobbes separates the two domains of nature and culture as the metaphysical foundations of political theory. The activity of politics, following the assumptions of mankind’s natural state of war, is, logically, militant and totalising. The polity is the state and its internal dynamics, including its subjects, are essentially subsumed and unknown for, following Aristotle, the needs of the security of the whole within the anarchical international sphere, are paramount. It is for this reason that IR scholars continue to hark back to Hobbes: the epistemological priority of the state founded upon naturalistic notions of human social behaviour. Thus the pre-modern understanding of who may be included in the polity is rendered superfluous, as the epistemological sights are raised to the construction of the state. Hobbes borrows the notion of mechanisation from the new scientific world-view. Political community arises from the mechanised nature of humans programmed for self-preservation in a material world. This is the source of compliant adherence to the sovereign Leviathan. The depiction of humanity as fundamentally propelled by natural forces links Hobbes with the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato, and yet Hobbes also introduces modern notions of the individual human subject. The Aristotelian notion of the natural state as the composite of families and by extension, of human individuals, is given a modern scientific twist by Hobbes to that of the man writ large as mechanised subject: Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principle part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.58 Hobbes’ theorisation of mechanism as the paradigmatic perspective of sociopolitical development abetted the Baconian science of understanding through


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domination and Newtonian principles of laws of motion, which arose from the Cartesian dualism of objective matter and subjective activity. Carolyn Merchant relates this modern paradigm to the conceptual ‘death of nature’.59 Indeed, political philosophising subsequent to Rousseau, who explicitly responded to Hobbes,60 starts from an epistemological acceptance of both the inert objectivity of nature and associated emptiness of meaning of natural forces. Furthermore, the mechanised teleology subconsciously underwriting society’s progression is directed by the power of the concept of rationality. The reduction of complex nature to simple laws of causation and/or order was a central feature of modern science and philosophy. This epistemological rationalisation was given further scientific authority by Newton, whose universal laws of motion provided a pseudo-cosmological template for political society. Indeed Kant’s conclusion to the Critique of Practical Reason: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’, illustrates his attempt to assimilate scientific methodologies with naturalised ethics.61 In contrast to Hobbes, Rousseau theoretically allows specific members of the polity a role in constructing their state so that there exists a mutual state of dependence.62 This social contract, ‘the foundation of all civil society’, becomes institutionally binding and political sovereignty is interdependent upon this dynamic relationship;63 the ‘general will’ of the people prevails, representing the interest of the state. Nature, personified, remains the metaphysical bedrock for government. Although for Rousseau, it is precisely because people have left behind a ‘natural’ state of innocence that society requires political laws. Nevertheless, the ambivalence ceded to the political concept of nature in opposition to the concept of socio-political civilisation is further theorised and epistemologically prioritised. Just as Hobbes incited Rousseau, so did Rousseau animate Kant.64 Rousseau had lamented the impossibility of lasting peace alongside the dynamics of fiercely avenged statist politics.65 Nevertheless, the state remains the defining unit and actor within international political theory in Kant’s plan for ‘perpetual peace’. The aim is to overcome the incongruity between harmonious domestic politics and the anarchical international realm.66 States are epistemologically prioritised alongside a notion of common humanity, which together create an impulse for universal peace. Kant, like Hobbes, and unlike Rousseau, regarded the state of nature to be the antithesis of civilisation. Further, the establishment of peace, and not merely a suspension of conflict, was a precondition of social life for rational people. Kant believed that inherent in humanity there resided a ‘dormant, moral disposition’ of good, which was pursued by ‘reason as the seat of the highest legislating power of morality’.67 The moral duty of peace was subject to the application of reason. Thus, ethics and socio-political rights coincided, and civil freedom was an outcome of rational adherence to laws that recognised the universality of humanity. Thus was reason posited as dichotomously superior to nature and humanity was essentialised as of one mind. That is, the world is recognised to be one community wherein the pursuit of peace and the common attributes

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of humanity dictate a singular notion of rationality. Furthermore, the sociohistoric context of Kant as theorist induces humanity to be modelled upon a Eurocentric, masculine notion of generic humanity in which rationality inheres, and from which rationality is espoused. Kant was also greatly influenced by Newton’s discoveries of ‘order and regularity combined with simplicity’ within nature.68 Significant to this debate and arising from these two formative philosophies is Kant’s publication Critique of Pure Reason. Here, he explicitly argued that reason should approach nature. Kant held on to the Cartesian notion of the superior status of humans as rational agents who imposed their will upon the natural world. Yet, the importance of Kant to Western political philosophy is his injection of morality to reasoning; the amoral subject of Hobbesian politics, of whom Rousseau despaired, is accredited with ethical import. Kant set himself the task of determining the metaphysics of nature and their internal dynamics, and thus returned to the Aristotelian debate.69 Yet, the Newtonian law of universal gravitation is accorded paradigmatic status in Kant’s formulation of empirical laws.70 Thus, Kant theorises from an acceptance of a priori laws of nature that reveal their ‘necessary existence’ and ‘intelligible’ conditions.71 Freedom, like that presented by Rousseau, is achieved through consensual rationality, that is, the imposition of the will of the majority. However, Kant extends theorisation of international politics from fragmented perception ‘between communities’ to, the whole picture of ideals and politics ‘as flowing across and through them’ (emphasis in the original).72 Such an intellectual foundation, conditional upon a singular rationalisation of morals embodied within humanity, problematises the Cartesian certainty of dualistic epistemology. Nevertheless the acceptance, as ontological, of innate violence in the state of nature, which civilisation needs to transcend, remains metaphysically foundational. Thus, Kant epitomised the modern trajectory that resulted in the age of Enlightenment and the eternal quest for freedom of thought and freedom of being.73 That this path would lead to universal peace built upon an acceptance of the inherent moral fibre of rational subjects was argued upon a Newtonian understanding of the ordered ranking of nature. Humans, as moral subjects, belonged to the realm of culture and so were capable of overcoming the initially mysterious and aggressive forces of nature, to seek harmonious civic order. However, the onus was upon humanity to respond to this moral propensity to be swayed by the teleological thrust of history, which is subject to naturalisation too. The hope was that ‘the human race finally achieves the condition in which all the seeds planted in it by Nature [sic] can fully develop and in which the destiny of the race can be fulfilled here on earth’.74 These three political theorists (Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant) show the slight, yet fundamental cognitive shift regarding the concept of nature, from that of a foundational, if ambivalent, referent, as inherited from the Classical Greek political theory, to the dichotomised other of human civilisation. This


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is the result of the absorption of Cartesian philosophy. Accordingly, the human being is defined as a thinking being. This mental process distinguished the mind from the body and introduced a metaphysical dualism that could separate knowable objects from the subjectivity of the thinking human. Thus the relationship of humanity to nature became conceptually dichotomous; humans were no longer metaphysically of nature as in pre-modern philosophies, but transcended nature on the basis of utilisation of rational faculties.75 In the case of humans not deemed to possess the capability to rationalise, for example, ‘savages’ still resident in a ‘state of nature’ inclined to live a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ life,76 their epistemological positioning became politicised as ontological fact. Thus were women and non-European adult men excluded from the rational realm of politics and constructed as knowable objects of nature. The ease of politically demarcating sovereign boundaries arose from the Cartesian definition of dichotomous relations. Hobbes’ imposition of the immortalised Leviathan is a theoretical construction of sovereignty as much as Kantian moral agents; both sovereign identities are constructed and legitimated in opposition to ‘nature’. Whether the state, as a mediating institution, between individuality and collectivity, for the pursuit of civic freedom, or the universalised individual, whose humanity overrides statism, is emphasised is immaterial; their shared decontextualised conception as the original norm for politicisation in IR theory is dependent upon the exclusion of plural and diverse subjects. The method of defining the epistemology foundational to politicisation has been implicitly discussed, that is, the philosophical naturalisation and relegitimation by the discourse of modern science of a historically and culturally contingent moment as universally applicable, but the ease of accepting such a rationale is described next.

The methodology of naturalisation The epistemological metaphysics constructing nature, and associated naturalised matter/objects, as feminine was given modern credence and scientific validation by Francis Bacon.77 Nature provided the matter for society’s advancement, whilst also glorifying the wonders of God’s creation. Bacon’s inductive method of scientific discovery, involving the accumulation of empirical data, was reliant upon the revelation and mastering of the resources of nature. Transformation of the environment for society’s use entailed a deterministic human–nature relationship. This was philosophically reconfirmed through Descartes’ insistence upon the detachment of the human from the object matter. These are fundamental foundations of the positivist methodology of social science.78 This belief, that natural science holds the answers to explain the social world, has been a dominant approach to the study of IR.79 Although positivism was first articulated by Auguste Comte at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the recognition of ‘only positive facts and observable phenomena, and rejecting metaphysics and theism’,80 the

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epistemological foundations had been previously lain; the belief in the neutrality of science and in the objectivity of the human observer lent politics the credibility of an autonomous realm of universal applicability. Sir Isaac Newton, two centuries earlier, had refined the Baconian ‘picture of nature’ to that of ‘a mechanical, inanimate, purposeless system of forces acting on matter in a way governed by inevitable laws of cause and effect’.81 Reason was thus extended to discover the underlying causes of phenomena and could not be constrained to analysing the findings of our senses. The purity of thought introduced by Plato was once again established by Descartes as the precondition of subjectivity and extended by Newton’s dismissal of the ‘vulgar’ senses, which could not be relied upon, in favour of laws of causation.82 Newton found within nature a system of mathematical causes and laws. This has since provided social science with a scientifically legitimated paradigm. The intermingling of Stoic philosophy and modern scientificity which was later supported by Enlightenment rationality, created a self-reifying history of high priests pontificating upon the bases of legitimation for knowledge and politicisation. Thus philosophically and scientifically was the natural world divested of subjective content; the material world came to be apprehended and of use only via the application of reason and predetermined, sequential mathematical forces. The dualism of politics/nature rendered both domains discrete and static: bound conceptually in theory and in practice. Subsequent to this legitimation by science and philosophy was the understanding that human progress advanced teleologically in search of the truth, considered as objectively knowable. Thus were ideological norms validated. Social context was significantly implicated with the evolution of political philosophy and scientific reasoning. It was within this socio-political context that Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant lived and wrote; these ‘fathers of international thought’ continued where the Greek philosophers left off to provide the ‘supporting shoulders for the master [sic] thinkers’ of contemporary IR theory.83 Thus continuing the metaphysical foundation of exclusion based upon a conceptual dualism between nature and politics. This genealogy illuminates the interdependent path of modern science and modern political philosophy despite the Cartesian incitement to separate values from facts; ways of perceiving and knowing are the same for political science as they are for natural science. Positivism, that is, the observation of the ‘facts’, reigns, regardless of the social and ecological contextual determinants. Vandana Shiva calls the essential reductionism involved in this epistemology ‘violent’: violating the subject of knowledge, who can only know according to the dichotomised fragmentation of the world, violating the ‘innate integrity’ of the object of knowledge, impoverishing knowledge systems and ground realities, thereby creating victims rather than beneficiaries, and semantically denuding the meaning of knowledge itself by excluding competing knowledges and perverting the scientific quest for truth.84 IR theory’s legitimating relationship with political philosophy85 has determined its metaphysical foundations, exclusive epistemological choices, ontological


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assumptions of objective nature and the methodological belief in learning from nature. The dichotomy of nature–culture has become an unquestioned norm of political theorising and is accepted as such within mainstream IR theory. Alternatively, such foundations provide the points of departure for a critical reappraisal of IR.

IR and an ecological perspective? The axiomatic relationship of ecological politics, which is discussed at length in the following chapter – that of humanity to the natural world – is thus the subsumed bedrock of political theory. The argument presented here returns to this fundamental and original epistemological departure and provides an opening to consciously reincorporate it within IR. The ‘creation myth’,86 provided by political philosophy to IR, insists upon a singular rationality resulting in a culturally specific telos. It impels an individualist ontology, positivist epistemology and methodology, and instrumentalist/ technological cosmology. The acceptance of this has not come about via ‘cognitive competition’ with other scientific philosophies but has been reified via a particular historical and cultural ideology presented as universal and, in the modern age, through state support for the appropriation of natural resources for capitalist gain.87 Furthermore, IR, as a relatively recent academic discipline, subsumed alongside politics, required distinctive and legitimating paradigmatic parameters. This necessitated the impulse to align itself with dominant forms of knowledge production. These two forces have reinforced the naturalisation of IR ‘orthodoxy’ which constrains both substance and methodological debate.88 Within IR, publications that attempt to incorporate the environment within this metaphysical structure do so by necessarily reducing the subject of their enquiry, unconsciously reproducing the dichotomised political insignificance of anything associated with the realm of nature. Examples of theoretical works, which have attempted to incorporate an ecological perspective, will be shown to be in vain if a metaphysical reliance upon the dichotomous axiom of nature–culture is not also critiqued. For theoretical and methodological efforts arising from this binarist metalanguage are determined by a logic of objectivity and dismissal of any issues associated with nature. Poststructuralist critiques of the powers of construction and legitimation offer an opening to less exclusive theorisation and oppressive forms of political praxis. However, the variability demanded of ontological readings is problematic. For the ecological underpinnings to life are both a conceptual constant and diversely plural in reality. The traditional metaphysics of IR excludes epistemological consideration of this diversity of ontological factors of agency upon earth. This in turn limits the articulation and application of sustainable policies and justice for peoples and beings who strive to live in interdependent harmony with their local environment and particular cultural context.

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Further, publications that proclaim objectivity in addressing practical questions, besides expressing overt anthropocentrism,89 buy into a metaphysics that logically loses the environment. The subordination of discrete environmental phenomena to the ‘high’ politics of the state, which may institutionalise procedures for the management of this ‘technical’ problem and may even reach interstate agreements for global co-operation, has been the acceptable approach within IR.90 Such technicalisation of reducible problems depoliticises ecological issues.91 These approaches aimed at problem-solving92 structurally accept the modern conceptual division between detached scientific knower and objective matter, as well as the Baconian creed of a singular and universalisable technological resolution to natural problems. Even where the political fragmentation of the world is seen to contrast with the global scale of ecological problems,93 the prior acceptance of the disciplinary boundaries and theoretical limitations of IR problematically reduces the input of the ecological issue, as well as restricting the ability to think beyond the imposed limits. The metaphysical framework of dichotomous relationships implicit in orthodox IR theorisation that inform the constitution of knowledge and politicisation ensures that the ecological input is secondary. This was the experience of Karen Litfin. Her research on the agreements leading to ‘The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer’ began initially from theoretical preconceptions of epistemic communities framing policies on the basis of scientific facts, that is, on a Cartesian distinction of scientific expert divorced from the object of enquiry searching for value-free facts from which to construct a universalisable political agreement. The political activity of delimiting ‘the boundaries of legitimate knowledge’ was found to require illumination: ‘Regimes of truth define not only what can be said but also what can be thought: to define is to control.’ Litfin found that as political problems have become increasingly entwined with scientific questions, ‘the ability to interpret reality has become a major source of political power’.94 In short, the metaphysical and metatheoretical assumptions needed to be questioned, for tinkering with theoretical and methodological procedures left the prevailing socio-economic interests intact and their particular epistemological presentation of science. For reality, that is ontology, had become a site of epistemological contestation for socio-political gain. Indeed, epistemological and/or methodological critique is effectively curtailed if not aligned with metatheoretical assessment of the whole packaged history of the subject. To this end, IR is restricted by its reliance upon a hegemonic embrace of neoliberal economics, an understanding of the political sphere as informed by a supposed neutral, positivist epistemology and a constrained concept of IR. As such the full, expansive consequences of any environmental phenomenon will not be realised; its relationships – possible or actual, emergent consequences, and the multitude of diverse but connected political implications will not be conceived; theorising from the status quo institutionalises ‘practices of


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denial’.95 However, if the beginning were informed by ecology, the pursuit of IR would be fundamentally transformed, as discussed in the introduction. ‘Ecological Relations’, thus, is a challenge not only to the substance of enquiry but also the metalanguage of normalised IR theory. As such theorising from an ecological perspective, emphasising ‘alternative ontologies, epistemologies, and ethical/political prescriptions, seeking to establish the freedom, dignity and peace of all [human] beings’ has been said to be possible only if and when, to borrow a phrase, ‘IR theory takes a leap of faith’.96 The metatheoretical assumptions of politicisation inherent in IR of atomistic, patriarchal and Western human subjects logically exclude an ecological perspective. It is precisely for this reason that the metaphysical apparatus needs to be reviewed and reselected. Realist, pluralist/liberal and Marxist theoretical approaches may be distinct theoretically, yet share this metaphysical foundation. Robyn Eckersley’s ambitious attempt to ‘widen the ambit of political discussion to include the question of our relationship to, and impact upon, the nonhuman world’97 fails because ultimately she remains reliant upon unreconstructed liberal and Marxist-inspired theories so disabling her attempt to reach an ecocentric approach to IR. This major obstacle has led some to question the validity of IR itself. As Pauline Rosenau forewarns, metaphysical critique could either ‘throw the discipline off balance, or . . . expand its horizons’;98 Hugh Dyer prefers to use the term ‘global politics’ to explain both the processes of environmental change and cultural involvement;99 Roland Bleiker urges us to ‘forget IR Theory’. This is not to dismiss ‘the practices that have framed our realities’ but to release us from the nostalgic familiarity of retold stories, which bind the future, in favour of a process of remembering in order to include.100 Bleiker explores the linguistic practice of disciplinary gate keeping that ensures the exclusivity of politicisation and, by doing so, discovers the potential to widen the frames of inclusion. Certainly, the epistemological and theoretical centrality of the state within modern IR is incompatible with an analysis of ecological determinants. Indeed, the state has been seen to actually ‘impede progress’ in comprehending the reverberations of ecological concerns.101 For, despite ecological issues challenging the limits of the concept of the state, ‘the state-centred agenda of “traditional” international political theory’ retains the power to mediate.102 Furthermore, the individualistic discourse of state sovereignty provides a legitimation of territorial possession,103 which, because it has evolved philosophically alongside an instrumentalist metaphysics and Cartesian epistemology, cannot theoretically evade objectification, and appropriation of anything ‘natural’. However, a critical analysis of state sovereignty finds that both global environmental concerns and local socio-ecological protests are actively challenging the legitimacy of the state, but also ensuring its defensive consolidation.104 In addition, the tension between the retention of the state, in theory, in the face of practical contestation from the ground confounds the

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modern separation of theory from practice. This has been heralded as the entry point for a new paradigmatic envisioning of politics.105 Paradigm shifts have been predicted, based on a socio-historical reading of progression that recognises that ecological questions disturb the modern, industrial paradigm.106 However, cultural involvement in the recognition of ecological issues does not necessitate paradigm change, nor is it ‘as disruptive of the theoretical endeavour’ of IR as expected.107 Instead, a ‘theoretical and practical impasse’ has been constructed to continue to marginalise questions of ecology.108 The crucial significance of power, that is, the power to determine knowledge and the power of that knowledge to construct specific political practices and ethical choices, needs to be explicitly addressed and interrupted before a profound change in the perspective of IR, as praxis, is effected. A recognition that ‘green political theory’, incorporating the principles of ecocentrism and an acceptance of the limits of growth, may enrich IR theory, by explaining and providing a normative logic for ‘human societies’ to deal with ecological crises, but it is not enough to dislodge the metaphysical foundations of anthropocentric utilitarianism and technological growth ad infinitum.109

Concluding the epistemological exclusivity of IR As this chapter has demonstrated, the current practice of IR structurally marginalises ecological questions. Regarding ecological relations as fundamental to politicisation ‘threatens the whole edifice’ of IR that has been built upon a historically and culturally specific epistemology and methodology.110 To quote Julian Saurin, ‘global environmental degradation arises out of the normal and mundane practices of modernity’ which directly produces a ‘severely restricted and substantially mediated’ knowledge of ecological destruction.111 This failure of IR theory to address ecological concerns, despite landmark publications,112 and continued acceptance of this fact, arises from the inheritance of conceptual and methodological givens, the genealogy of which is described above. These have rendered ecological issues ‘invisible’, since they are part of the ‘natural’ and consequently depoliticised world, and will continue to perpetuate this invisibility unless the reasons for exclusion are revealed before theorisation from an ecological perspective is initiated.113 For the internalisation of ecological considerations within the prevailing theoretical structures available within the discipline of IR, effectively disables the epistemological potential of the ecological concept.114 A focus upon ecological relations necessitates the rejection of the cultural determinacy of modernist conceptual structures, which had transformed ‘a base and worthless wilderness’ into a humanised ‘nature’ as the basis for ‘industrialized and democratic civilization’.115 The juxtapositioning of nature with the state, inherited from Enlightenment political philosophy, has bequeathed the necessary logic of unified order within the political realm, and exclusion of all beings and life forms that are culturally encoded as


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‘natural’.116 Responding to Anne Sisson Runyan’s incitement to begin to include these related, yet excluded beings – women, nonhuman animals, and non-white peoples – entails the questioning of who constitutes our political community and how political community is constituted.117 If, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, conceived notions of political identity and community are shown to be restrictive, violating the integrity of the ontological diversity of life and plurality of epistemologies, then the need to reconceive these notions in broader terms is a normative inevitability for peaceful international relations. This may foreclose the demise of IR as conceived by the modern discourse delineated previously, by destabilising its heritage of epistemological certainty and, as a result, disrupting the philosophic relationship between political rationality and naturalised violence.118 To reconceptualise, and thence restructure, IR in terms other than those determined by modern forces, requires an elasticity of political semantics to forget the modern constraints and to refigure inclusive horizons. Vaclev Havel has endorsed this view: that the modern heritage to politicisation of the world has become redundant, indeed ‘exhausted its potential’ because it cannot perceive life as ‘rooted in earth and, at the same time, the cosmos’.119 Consequently, to reearth politics and provide a theoretical frame of inclusivity requires an expansion of Enlightenment thought, without the reductionist methodologies; or, to quote Michel Foucault, to ‘work on our limits . . . giving form to our impatience for liberty’.120 This entails breaking free from the modern frame of Western language and history,121 which destined the divorce of subjective humanity from objective nature premised upon the essential naturalisation of the whole world that in turn was based upon a singular, universalised notion of rationality. For this epistemological move has resulted in the ‘multiple exclusion and control, not only of non-humans, but of various groups of humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature’.122 Furthermore, the prevailing positivist paradigm has predetermined, from this epistemological reading as metaphorical ontological foundation, the normalisation of the power of some humans over others, thereby justifying the institutionalisation of exploitative relations within the political structure; To be defined as ‘nature’ in this context is to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture take place. It is to be defined as a terra nullis, a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes.123 Politicisation is ideological: constructed by specific socio-cultural forces in opposition to the corresponding process of naturalisation; presented as

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common logic, this metalanguage has been actively sustained and persists in nullifying the agency and excluding the political potential of those actors and domains labelled ‘natural’. Alternately, Rob Walker poses the situation; ‘[o]nce upon the time, the world was not as it is. The patterns of inclusion and exclusion we now take for granted are historical innovations.’ They are not natural, nor inevitable, but have become second nature.124 The politics of dualistic subjectivity, whereby a naturalised ‘Other’ is posited in opposition to the political agent is a fragile, historically contingent result of the narrative of IR theory selected from political philosophy. This selective reading legitimates an exclusive interpretation of for whom the domain of ethics and politics pertains; it structurally excludes, for example, theoretical perception of 85 per cent of the world’s population.125 Thus the boxed nature of IR126 can only truly theorise for a minority of the world’s inhabitants; IR is logically constructed to be ‘intensely parochial’.127 Yet, it is precisely this fragility that renders the discipline open to critical reconstruction and a cosmopolitan expansion of horizons. Richard Devetak proceeds from Walker’s thesis, reconfirming that ‘the inscription of boundaries is a political act par excellence’ yet, ‘the project of modernity’ by defining these limits and the range of the identity of a political actor thereby also reveals the principles and processes of this political epistemology.128 This allows for a deconstruction of the political and the natural and, significantly, the possibility of readdressing the ethical questions of excluding relations and so reframing the underlying epistemology, indeed the metatheoretical understanding of IR theory. Alternately, in order to prioritise the multiplicity and diversity of relations rather than the singular ‘international’, Christine Sylvester relabels IR ‘relations international’ and thereby challenges the notion of a singular history metaphysically grounding IR theory. Rather the many ‘ ‘‘inters” of all sorts’ who ‘defy field-invented parameters’ may be perceived alongside the political ‘mode of relating very distantly, or of seeking to avoid relations, through rule-governed procedures and decision-making styles that constrain conversations’.129 Instead, the modern political heritage accedes only minimal and accidental relations with nonhuman lives and earth.130 Yet, the liberal language of modern politics and its metaphysical constructs that dualistically produce knowledge and theories is receptive to challenge,131 against the innate power and ‘generative capacities’ of theories as ‘acquired, socially constituted dispositions’.132 For the naturalisation of this specific logic, which reproduces established power relations may be discursively opened. Correspondingly, the applicability of ethnocentric epistemologies to non-Western communities or of humanist discourse to nonhumans is of interest for the ‘ontological mutation’ demanded of the object.133 Thus, it will be seen that dualistic vocabulary has reified entrenched power imbalances and institutionalised political agency.134 Caution is required, when the Other of our modern heritage is reaffirmed, not to subsume difference according to the universalising and normalising forces of the status quo. One needs to heed Michel


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Foucault’s wariness of the ‘fundamental’ ‘indignity of speaking for others’ amidst the absence of theoretical structures and allow ‘only those directly concerned . . . in a practical way’ to speak up for themselves.135 Similarly, bell hooks, who actively chooses to theorise from the margins, adamantly insists that a site of repression is also a site of resistance; accordingly, language is politicised based upon its site of deliverance.136 In corresponding manner, theorising from an ecological perspective is not only distinctively ideological,137 but also politically radical for daring to speak from the underside of Cartesian epistemological divisions. Yet, to illuminate the underside reifies the ‘dualistic dynamic’ of political praxis reconfirming Cartesian separation and exclusionary political practices. Further, the ontological truism – ‘that humans are animals and have the same dependence on a healthy biosphere as other forms of life – is resisted and needs to be stressed’.138 Instead, theorisation needs to be informed by a quest for a democratic culture beyond dualism, ending colonising relationships and finding a mutual, ethical basis for enriching co-existence with earth others. We can realign reason not with the master formations of élite control and the rational egoism, which fails to recognise the other as a limiting principle, but with social formations, built on radical democracy, co-operation and mutuality.139 The ecological plea for recognition of biological and cosmic relatedness, arising from a doctrine of holistic ‘oneness’140 need not equate with a negation of the potential of humanity. The simplistic caricaturisation of an ecological perspective as misanthropic purposefully overlooks the political attempt ‘to foster the development of a non-hierarchical ethics of complementarity among humans and between humanity and nonhuman life’.141 Rather, it is a call for the simultaneous recognition of ontological and epistemological contextualisation. Metaphysical and cosmological critique of the primary relationship of politics, that of humanity and the natural world, is required to disturb the particular cultural and abstract representation that presents a misleading picture of the relations of this world. The ‘metaphysical fact of interconnectedness’142 revealed through an ecological reading of IR contrasts strikingly with the exclusionary narrative of the discipline of IR. It is for this reason that an ecological perspective may be the redeeming factor for IR theory, holding the potential to emancipate politics and humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world; ‘emancipation writ large’ starting from an admission of the ‘ontological primacy’ of interrelatedness and the ‘positive affirmation’ of an ‘existential attitude of mutuality’.143 Ecological, as well as cultural, embeddedness pertains to political praxis. As IR currently stands, an ecological reading of politics constitutes ‘a shocking departure’ for many theorists and practitioners ‘from what they were brought up to believe’.144 What an ecological perspective, as cosmologically and metaphysically

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foundational to an inclusive theorisation of politics on this earth, entails is explored in the following chapter, before a metatheory as method is proposed in Chapter 3.

Notes 1 Hollis, M. and Smith, S. (1990) Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, chapter 2. See also the special (1998) issue of the Review of International Studies, 24. 2 Smith, S. (1992) ‘The Forty Years’ Detour: The Resurgence of Normative Theory in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21 (3), 489–506, p. 490. 3 Wallace, W. (1996) ‘Truth and power, monks and technocrats: theory and practice in international relations’, Review of International Studies, 22, 301–321. 4 Lapid, Y. (1989) ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly, 33, 235–254. 5 Rosenau, P. (1990) ‘Once Again into the Fray: International Relations Confronts the Humanities’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 19 (1), 83–110. 6 Frost, M. (1986) Towards a Normative Theory of International Relations: A Critical Analysis of the Philosophical and Methodological Assumptions in the Discipline with Proposals towards a Substantive Normative Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 12. 7 Brown, C. (1981) ‘International theory: new directions?’, Review of International Studies, 7, 173–185, p. 173. 8 Dunne, T., Cox, M. and Booth, K. (1998) ‘Introduction: The Eighty Years’ Crisis 1919–1999’ Review of International Studies, 24, v–xii. 9 Zalewski, M. (1996) ‘ “All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up”: theory, theorists, theorising’, in Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10 Saurin, J. (1996a) ‘Globalisation, Poverty, and the Promises of Modernity’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 25 (3), 657–680, p. 658. 11 Smith, S. (1995) ‘The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory’, in Booth, K. and Smith, S. (eds) International Relations Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 3. Also the argument of Campbell, D. and Dillon, M. (eds) (1993) The Political Subject of Violence, Manchester, Manchester University Press. 12 Walker, R. B. J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13 Maclean, J. (1981) ‘Political Theory, International Theory, and Problems of Ideology’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (2), 102–125. 14 Chan, S. (1998) ‘An ontologist strikes back: a further response to Hollis and Smith’, Review of International Studies, 24, 441–443. 15 Maclean, (1981). 16 Der Derian, J. (1989) ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations’, in Der Derian, J. and Shapiro, M. (eds) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International, pp. 3–5. 17 Maclean, (1981). 18 Sylvester, C. (1996) ‘The contribution of feminist theory to international relations’, in Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 272. 19 Halliday, F. (1994) Rethinking International Relations, Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 24.


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20 Cf. Halliday, F. (1996) ‘The future of international relations: fears and hopes’, in Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also Hurrell, A. (1995) ‘International Political Theory and the Global Environment’, in Booth, K. and Smith, S. (eds) International Relations Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press. 21 Cf. Walker, (1993). 22 Cf. Waltz, K. (1959) Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis, New York: Colombia University Press; also Linklater, A. (1990, 2nd ed.) Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, Basingstoke and London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. Although Linklater recognises that the state may thwart humanity’s capability to constitute a moral community. 23 Saurin, J. (1995) ‘The end of International Relations? The state and international theory in the age of globalization’, in Macmillan, J. and Linklater, A. (eds) Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, London: Pinter Publishers, p. 245. 24 Some notable examples include: Enloe, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: University of California Press; Walker, R. B. J. (1992) ‘Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations’, in Peterson, V. S. (ed.) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers; Sylvester, C. (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 25 Zalewski, M. (1998) ‘Where is Woman in International Relations? “To Return as a Woman and be Heard’’ ’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (4), 847–867. 26 Bretherton, C. (1998) ‘Global environmental politics: putting gender on the agenda?, Review of International Studies, 24, 85–100, p. 96. 27 Der Derian, J. and Shapiro, M. (eds) (1989) International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan International. 28 Smith, S. (1997) ‘Power and truth: a reply to William Wallace’, Review of International Studies, 23 (4), 507–516. Also Hollis, M. and Smith, S. (1996) ‘A response: why epistemology matters in international theory’, Review of International Studies, 22 (1), 111–116. 29 Walker, (1993) p. 5. 30 Smith, (1995) p. 3. 31 Cf. Murphy, C. N. and Tooze, R. (1991) ‘Getting Beyond the “Common Sense” of the IPE Orthodoxy’, in The New International Political Economy, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., regarding International Political Economy theory. The argument holds true also for IR theory. 32 Maclean, (1981) pp. 107–108. 33 Cox, R. W. (1981) ‘Social forces, states, and world orders: Beyond international relations theory’, Millennium, 10 (2), 126–155. 34 Maclean, (1981). 35 Cf. Schmidt, B. C. (1994) ‘The historiography of academic international relations’, Review of International Studies, 20, 349–367. 36 Williams, H., Wright, M. and Evans, T. (eds) (1993) A Reader in International Relations and Political Theory, Buckingham: Open University Press, p. 8. 37 Smith, (1995) defines ten ways of approaching IR. 38 Walker, (1993). 39 Williams et al., (1993). 40 Williams et al., (1993) pp. 9–29. 41 Jowett, B. (1871) The Dialogues of Plato, (Vol. II), ‘The Republic, Book IV’, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 190.

32 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

The exclusivity of international relations Jowett, (1871) pp. 274–275. Jowett, (1871) p. 284. This does not relate to the Guardian class who must have no personal relations. Thompson, J. A. K. (trans.) (1876, 1978 printing; revised ed.) The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. Williams et al., (1993) pp. 30–44. Aristotle in Williams et al., (1993) pp. 30–32. Aristotle in Williams et al., (1993) p. 41. Lawson-Tancred, H. (1986) Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd., De Anima, Book II. Peltonen, M. (1996) ‘Bacon’s Political Philosophy’, in Peltonen, M. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 284. Pérez-Ramos, A. (1996) ‘Bacon’s legacy’, in Peltonen, M. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 327. Cf. Williams et al., (1993). Fox Keller, E. (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ch. 2. Descartes quoted by Anscombe, E. and Geach, P. T. (trans. and ed.) (1954) Descartes: Philosophic Writings, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., p. 34. Descartes quoted by Anscombe and Geach, (1954), p. 46. Laird, J. (1934) Hobbes, London: Ernest Benn Ltd. Strauss, L. (1965) ‘On the Spirit of Hobbes Political Philosophy’, in Brown, K. C. (ed.) Hobbes Studies, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. See chapter XLVI of the Leviathan for a defamation of the ‘vain philosophy, and fabulous traditions’ inherited from Aristotle, in Molesworth Bart, W. (ed.) (1839) The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, London: John Bohn, pp. 664–688. The opening sentences of the Leviathan in Molesworth Bart, (1839), p. ix. Merchant, C. (1982) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, London: Wildwood House Ltd. Laird, (1934). In White Beck, L. (ed.) (1988) Kant: Selections, London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, pp. 325–327. Rousseau in Williams et al., (1993) pp. 100–111. Rousseau, J-J. (1973) The Social Contract and Discourses, London and Melbourne: Dent, p. 302. White Beck, L. (1988) Kant: Selections, London: Collier Macmillan Publishers. Rousseau in Williams et al., (1993). Kant in Williams et al., (1993) pp. 112–121. Kant in Williams et al., (1993) p. 119. White Beck, (1988) p. 3. Beiser, F. C. (1992) ‘Kant’s intellectual development: 1746–1781’, in Guyer, P. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, M. (1992) ‘Causal laws and the foundations of natural science’, in Guyer, P. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in particular, pp. 175–180. Kant cited by Friedman, (1992) p. 180. Franke, M. F. N. (1995) ‘Immanuel Kant and the (Im)Possibility of International Relations Theory’, Alternatives, 20, 279–322, pp. 279–80. Cf. Kant, I. ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in White Beck (ed.), (1988). Kant, I. ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, in White Beck (ed.) (1988), p. 424. This remains for Linklater, (1990), p. xii, the root of ‘a modern theory of international relations’.


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75 Pepper, D. (1984) The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm. 76 Hobbes in Williams et al., (1993) p. 93. 77 Fox Keller, E. (1983) ‘Gender and Science’, in Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. B. (eds) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, London: D. Reidel Publishing Company; Fox Keller, (1985). 78 Pepper, (1984). 79 Cf. the Explaining approach of Hollis and Smith (1990); Smith S. (1996) ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 80 Pepper, (1984) p. 59. 81 Hollis and Smith, (1990) p. 48. 82 Newton in Fox Keller, E. and Grontkowski, C. R. (1983) ‘The Mind’s Eye’, in Harding, S. and Hintikka, M. B. (eds) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, p. 216. 83 Thompson, K. W. (1994) Fathers of International Thought: The Legacy of Political Theory, London: Louisiana State University Press, pp. x and 129. 84 Shiva, V. (1987) ‘The Violence of Reductionist Science’, Alternatives, 12, 243–261, pp. 243–244. 85 Maclean, (1981); Williams, H. (1992) International Relations in Political Theory, Milton Keynes: Open University Press; Walker, (1993). 86 Doran, P. (1995) ‘Earth, power, knowledge: towards a critical global environmental politics’, in Macmillan, J. and Linklater, A. (eds) Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, London: Pinter Publishers, p. 204. 87 Shiva, (1987); Shiva, (1998). 88 Cf. Murphy and Tooze, (1991). 89 Brenton T. (1994) The Greening of Machiavelli: The Evolution of International Environmental Politics, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., pp. 6–7. 90 Examples include: Haas, P. M. (1990) Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation, New York: Colombia University Press; Haas, P. M., Keohane, R. O. and Levy, M. A. (eds) (1993) Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press; Hurrell, A. and Kingsbury, B. (eds) (1992) The International Politics of the Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Thomas, C. (1992) The Environment in International Relations, London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs; Young, O. R. (1989) International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment, New York: Cornell University Press. 91 Paterson, M. (1995) ‘Radicalizing regimes? Ecology and the critique of IR theory’, in Macmillan, J. and Linklater, A. (eds) Boundaries in Question: New Directions in International Relations, London: Pinter Publishers. 92 Cf. Cox, (1981). 93 Hurrell and Kingsbury, (1992); Board, S. (1996) ‘Environmental Politics Within or Without the Security of the State’, (MSc degree dissertation, University of Wales, Aberystwyth). 94 Litfin, K. (1994) Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation, Chichester, West Sussex: Colombia University Press, p. 8. 95 Paterson, (1995) p. 220. 96 Laferrière, E (1996) ‘Emancipating International Relations Theory: An Ecological Perspective’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 25 (1), 53–75, p. 62.

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97 Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, London: UCL Press Ltd., p. 2. Also Eckersley, R. (1995) ‘Liberal Democracy and the Rights of Nature: The Struggle for Inclusion’, Environmental Politics, 4 (4), 169–198. 98 Rosenau, (1990) p. 104. 99 Dyer, H. (1993) ‘EcoCultures: Global Culture in the Age of Ecology’, Millennium: Journal Of International Studies, 22 (3), 483–504, p. 500. 100 Bleiker, R. (1997) ‘Forget IR Theory’, Alternatives, 22, 57–85, pp. 58–59. 101 Thomas, C. (1993) ‘Beyond UNCED: An Introduction’, Environmental Politics, 2 (4), 1–27, p. 2. 102 Hurrell, (1995) p. 152. 103 Kuehls, T. (1996) Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics, London: University of Minnesota Press. 104 Conca, K. (1994) ‘Rethinking the Ecology-Sovereignty Debate’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 23 (3), 701–711; Board, (1996). 105 Saravanamuttu, P. (1993) ‘Environment, Development, Security’, Environmental Politics, 2 (4), 225–237. 106 Pirages, D. (1978) The New Context for International Relations: Global Ecopolitics, North Scituate, Massachusetts: Duxbury Press; Rodman, J. (1980) ‘Paradigm Change in Political Science: An Ecological Perspective’, American Behavioral Scientist, 24 (1), 49–78. 107 Dyer, (1993) p. 499. 108 Elaborated by Smith, S. (1993) ‘Environment on the Periphery of International Relations: An Explanation’, Environmental Politics, 2 (4), 28–45, and powerfully reifying the status quo according to Saurin, J. (1996b) ‘International Relations, Social Ecology and the Globalisation of Environmental Change’, in Vogler, J. and Imber, M. F. (eds) The Environment and International Relations, London and New York: Routledge, p. 78. 109 Cf. Paterson, M. (1996b) ‘Green Politics’, in Burchill, S. and Linklater, A. (eds) Theories of International Relations, Basingstoke: Macmillan. 110 Smith, (1993) p. 44. 111 Saurin, J. (1993) ‘Global Environmental Degradation, Modernity and Environmental Knowledge’, Environmental Politics, 2 (4), 46–64, p. 62. 112 Cf. Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring, London: Hamish Hamilton; Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. W. III (1974, first published 1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, London: Pan Books. These are not IR theory texts but demonstrate the internationalisation of ecological phenomena. 113 Williams, M. (1996) ‘International Political Economy and Global Environmental Change’, in Vogler, J. and Imber, M. F. (eds) The Environment and International Relations, London and New York: Routledge, p. 43. 114 This is exemplified by the work of the Sprouts; Sprout, H. and Sprout, M. (1965) The Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs: With Special Reference to International Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Sprout, H. and Sprout, M. (1971) Toward A Politics of the Planet Earth, London: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. 115 Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 68. 116 Sisson Runyan, A. (1992) ‘The State of “Nature”: A Garden Unfit for Women and Other Living Things’, in Peterson, V. S. (ed.) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations, Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers. 117 Sisson Runyan, (1992).


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118 Campbell, D. and Dillon, M. (1993) ‘The end of philosophy and the end of international relations’, first chapter in Campbell, D. and Dillon, M. (eds) The Political Subject of Violence, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 119 Vaclev Havel quoted by Neack, L. and Knudson, R. M., (1996) ‘Re-Imagining the Sovereign State: Beginning an Interdisciplinary Dialogue’, Alternatives, 21, 135–148, p. 136. 120 Foucault, M. (1984f) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books, p. 50. 121 Oelschlaeger, (1991). 122 Plumwood, V. (1993a) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge, p. 4. 123 Plumwood, (1993a) p. 4. 124 Walker, (1993) p. 179. 125 Saurin, (1996a). 126 Walker, R. B. J. (1995) ‘International Relations and the Concept of the Political’, in Booth, K. and Smith, S. (eds) International Relations Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press; Walker, (1993). 127 Walker, (1993) p. 180. 128 Devetak, R. (1995) ‘The Project of Modernity and International Relations Theory’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 24 (1), 27–51, p. 50 129 Sylvester, (1994) p. 219. 130 Plumwood, (1993a). 131 Luke, T. W. (1996) ‘Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of Environments, Bodies, and Nature’, Alternatives, 21 (1), 1–30. 132 Bourdieu, P. (Adamson, M., trans.) (1990) ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 13. 133 Bourdieu, P. (Nice, R., trans.) (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 177. 134 Cf. Saurin, (1996a). 135 Gilles Deluze quoted in Sheridan, A. (1980) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, London and New York: Tavistock Publications, p. 114. 136 hooks, b. (1991) ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround. 137 Cf. Vincent, A. (1993) ‘The Character of Ecology’, Environmental Politics, 2 (2), 248–276. 138 Plumwood, (1993a) p. 6. 139 Plumwood, (1993a) p. 196. 140 Mathews, F. (1991) The Ecological Self, London: Routledge, p. 147. 141 Murray Bookchin, in Chase, S. (ed.) (1991) Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, p. 133. 142 Mathews, (1991), p. 148. 143 Eckersley, (1992), p. 53. 144 Foreman, D. (1991) ‘Second Thoughts of an Eco-Warrior’, in Chase, S. (ed.) (1991) Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Boston, MA: South End Press, p. 117.

2


It is remarkable that we now have to state this obvious truth as if it were new, and invent the word ‘ecological’.1

An ecological perspective introduces the possibility of seeing and analysing the relations of organic life interdependent with this earth, however that may be organised politically. As the previous chapter testified, IR has traditionally limited its conceptual scope to culturally and historically specific autonomous territories and identities; thus theorists are cognitively constrained in their reading of relations. The dismissal or utilitarian conception of the ecological base to political life has become naturalised within status quo praxis, engendering an implicit world hierarchy and inherently legitimising exploitative relations. Theoretically, this has been absolved via a particular reading of political philosophy and reconfirmed by Enlightenment rationality that posits dichotomous relationships within a world of infinite resources and capabilities at humanity’s disposal. In contrast, an ecological perspective to politics is necessarily holistic and expansively synergistic. Epistemology is informed by interdependent relationships; politics strives to ensure sustainable and just stasis. Consequently the prioritising of an ecological position is fundamentally critical of the restricted perspective of IR theory and inherently challenges the discipline. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the rich variety of debate within the vast field of ecological literature. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive bibliographic detailing, but a sympathetic condensation to explicate the core understanding of an ecological perspective. For ecological discourse embodies a pioneering and vital strand of a transcultural movement of changing values, emergent from practical engagement with the natural world.2

The history of ‘ecology’ Humanity’s relationship with the environment has been an eternal axis of debate. The modification of the physical environment from a hypothesised natural condition is a traditional departure for political debate in the West


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dating at least from the Hellenistic age (fifth century BC).3 In 1864 George Marsh introduced the notion that humanity has the alarming potential to wreak negative consequences upon earth based upon a catalogue of destructive changes to the physical landscape since Roman times.4 Around the same time, in 1866, the zoologist Ernst Haeckel defined the study of the interrelationships between organisms and the environment as the study of ecology.5 Alternatively, it has been said that the term ecology first appeared in 1873.6 This epoch experienced population growth in Europe and the resurgence of colonial expeditions for capitalist exploitation of global resources.7 Ecological study was diametrically opposed to this fashionable Baconian creed of extending ‘the Bounds of Human Empire’.8 The transformation of the biophysical domain for capitalist exploitation politicised the understanding of ecology. It evolved to embody the fusion of the two distinct intellectual strands, biology and economics; the former ‘antimechanistic, holistic approach’ derived from Haeckel and the second strand was energy economics, which emphasised the scarcity and non-renewability of resources.9 Political activism was concerned with the direction of scientific research, the conservation of aesthetically pleasing landscapes and associated, naturalised moral values resulting in a fusion of Darwinian and Malthusian sciences with the rural idyllism of nineteenth century Romantics. Alternately, it has been argued by the historian of ecology, Anna Bramwell, that ecology, as a concept with either an implicit or explicit notion of political consciousness, has only just emerged despite these antecedents. She finds that over the course of the twentieth century the politicisation of ecology has been warped by its legacy of restrictive, scarcity-oriented policies, inciting primitivist isolationism, resulting in a negative reactionary ethos. She argues that ecological thought may be read as a ‘convincing’ history based solely on belief in ‘the essential harmony of nature’ and the critical attitude shown towards ‘the bounds of ordinary political discourse’.10 Thus, it can be seen from these two different histories that the term ‘ecology’ is a politically malleable term, but also that it has political impetus per se. Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, can be said to have brought the term ‘ecology’ to widespread attention.11 This was expanded into an explicit sociopolitical movement in the Western world of the 1960s when disillusionment and concern about the direction of progress alongside civil resistance towards events and issues that undermined the quality of life became rallying political points12 fermenting into ‘a crisis of participation’.13 The theoretical upheavals unleashed by this political activity i.e., the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist cultural theories, expanded the scope for political analysis of the world.14 George Sessions summarises this genealogy. He contends that there have been a number of previous, largely suppressed, ecological ‘waves’. The first ‘wave’ began with St Francis in the thirteenth century, who alone urged ‘a return to an animistic ecological egalitarianism’ and continued through to the ‘countercultural surge of nature-oriented thought’ in the eighteenth century in reaction to the ascent of the ‘scientific/technological world view’ led by

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Rousseau and contemporaries. A second ecological wave began in the 1960s and faded out with the co-option of environmentalism from the late 1970s. Finally, the present era is receptive to a third ‘major deep ecology movement’.15 It should be noted that Sessions draws from Eurocentric literature and events, presented as representative of the universal picture. However, whether the imminent potency of ecology as a political force constitutes a paradigmatic perspective requires examination next.

Ecological perspective as paradigm? A paradigm is a coherent and ‘normal’ research practice.16 Any newly emergent paradigm, although tempered to some degree by the values and norms of the preceding, dominant world-view, requires a normalising and ‘suitable myth’. However, this immediately ensures compliance with institutionalised epistemology.17 Whether an ecological perspective is conceptually strong enough to mould epistemology to its own parameters and not be rendered powerless by incorporation is the crux of this debate. On the other hand, the abandonment of an obsolete and mechanistic worldview is required if theorisation aims to be accountable to ‘a livable world’ wherein the diversity of life commands an ethos of respect.18 Such an ecological paradigm would compel us to recognise our biological and social embeddedness and interdependence with particular temporal and ecosystemic contexts. It would require a rejection of traditional epistemological principles that legitimise the ‘exploitation and liquidation of nonhuman nature’, based upon a homocentric ethics and teleology. John Rodman presents three potential epistemological bases from which to allow for the manifestation of individual (human and nonhuman) physical, spiritual and cosmic consciousness: 1

2

3

The natural condition of diversity and inherent richness of vital potentialities is defended against oppressive monocultures, whether expressed biologically, socially, and/or psychologically. The external tangible reality of nature, irrespective of its evolutionary flux, is rediscovered and provides ultimately an eternal base, ‘regulative idea’, or ‘cosmic order’ for political societies. The ‘otherness of nature, together with the diversity characteristic of natural ecosystems’ is necessary for spiritual equilibrium.19

Liberation is the goal for all from recognition that human liberation is bound with ‘liberation of nature’. A paradigm that responds to an ecological perspective entails an integration of morals with politics, a deepening of the understanding of ecology as more than the external ecosphere but also ‘a unifying metaphor to illuminate and guide the political realm’ where it is inappropriate to regard nature as a commodity and, lastly, sustainable and resilient societies working creatively through the contradictory dynamics of centralised co-ordination and decentralised autonomy.20


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The acceptance of such a paradigm would introduce incremental qualitative socio-political changes: a process of normalisation. The mechanistic perspective inherited from Cartesian–Newtonian science will be made epistemologically inapplicable to describe the density of interdependence and pervasiveness of crisis throughout the world. The resulting paradigm shift to enable articulation of the processes of ecological devastation is essentially trans-disciplinary and trans-conceptual. Its focus upon non-linear evolutionary progression and mutually dynamic interactions is a theoretical and politico-cultural challenge for the ‘Solar Age’.21 Alternately, this era determined by a ‘new ecological paradigm’ has been called the ‘post-exuberant age’ to express the epistemological shift from presumed environmental resource abundance and associated infinite exploitation and/or utilitarian management in an era when humans were considered ‘exceptional’.22 Scepticism directed towards alternative ecological paradigms and criticism of the lack of explicit procedures that would bring about a fundamental change in values and ideals to enable ‘normative transition’ and translation into political activity,23 draws an ecological perspective back into the dominant, reductionist paradigm that is framed to ignore ecological fundamentals. It is the powers to construct epistemology and thereby determine what it is possible to think, which, in turn, guide ideology and political praxis, which need discursive critique as the genealogy of IR illuminated in the previous chapter. An ecological perspective brings forth theoretical subversion of normalised political praxis. Whether an ecological paradigm will be accepted as ‘normal science’ and therefore an accepted way of perceiving politicisation and theorisation remains open-ended and so possible. It is important to consider insofar as it has ‘suggested, inspired and fortified the perspectives of the Deep Ecology movement’.24 The corresponding ecophilosophical discussion and critique of political fundamentals instigated are essentially constitutive of an ecological perspective. If it is to be accepted that an ecological perspective questioning ‘the fundamental premises of the dominant social paradigm’ from diverse epistemological grounds then politically revolutionary times are ahead.25 Furthermore, a challenging ‘new environmental paradigm’ that prioritises the earth’s life systems, and not the socially constructed autonomies that are constantly reified as reality, represents definable social science praxis. However, a shared vocabulary employed in mutually incomprehensible ways creates a tension that needs to be positively reflected upon rather than balked at;26 providing a significant crisis and ‘occasion for retooling’.27 For, the paradigm of deep ecology is revolutionary in its metaphysics, epistemology, and cosmology, but deep ecologists do not seek to overthrow governments . . . or to issue anything like a comprehensive, all-embracing political program . . . Deep ecologists are questing for ways to liberate and cultivate the ecological consciousness. From ecological consciousness will naturally flow an ecological resistance.28

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An ecological paradigm entails consciousness of ecological philosophy and a relaxation of accepted ways of articulating political praxis. For the mainstream scientific paradigm, rooted in a neo-Darwinian theory of evolution that frames epistemological understanding of the world perspective, is severely deficient to account for the ‘living’, ‘highly purposive’, ‘self-regulative’ and creatively conservative dynamics of the holistic ecological system. Ontologically the earth denies the composite notions of the dominant paradigm modelled upon neo-Darwinism and a Newtonian world-view, namely, compartmentalisation, empiricism, induction, randomness, mechanism, causality, passivism, and reductionism. This prevailing paradigm retains its strength of credibility because it provides a rationalisation of capitalist ‘development’.29 In reproducing the interests of the prevailing industrial structure (and the few humans who benefit), it reproduces its own self-styled legitimating forces and thereby creates a closed circle of validity and impetus. Thus, since the hegemony of the global ecosphere is denied and the laws of ecosystemic equilibrium are not recognised, it could be said that the laws and politically legitimised practices of human society are groundless, floundering ontologically because ecologically. On these grounds, it has been predicted, with confidence, that a ‘new paradigm of production’ will come about incrementally and dialectically through the ‘struggle and creation’ of marginalised peoples.30 However, if ‘deep ecology is more a collection of diverse ideas than a welldefined paradigm’31 and since, following Kuhn, ‘the modern mind’ is composed of ‘many anomalies’, then the ‘pre-paradigmatic age’ could still be considered intellectually revolutionary and preferable to one defined solely by a ‘normal science’.32 Alternatively, the ecological concept of holistic interconnectedness may be confusing, enabling the Western paradigm to persist on the basis of ‘historical infrastructure priority’, that is, ease of conceptual acceptance, rather than ontological actuality. Thus, a revised attitude to articulating paradigmatic bases for politicisation is required that corresponds both to the plurality of epistemologies and the diversity composite of ontology.

Ways of articulating an ecological paradigm An ecological paradigm allows for a positive, as opposed to defensive and reactionary, resistance to the prevailing reductionist ideological structure. The plurality of sources informing an ecological paradigm – Eastern spiritual mythologies, native American traditions, excluded Western religious and philosophical works, the science of ecology and even works of art33 – furthermore confounds the hegemonic and singular world-view from which political thinking emerges. Since an ecological paradigm incites, because metaphysically founded upon, spiritual awareness and cosmological consciousness as well as the cognitive rationalisation for theoretical debates, some ecological literature experiments with forms of writing that traditional


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theorists find disturbing and/or easy to dismiss, reasserting the power of the status quo. Examples include John Seed’s appeal, drawing upon the subconscious pantheist attitude of Westerners to recite prayers, to the Spirit of Gaia34 and Joanna Macy calls for humanity to rejoin the story of eternal life of Gaia through the beats of the rhythm of life.35 The persistence of a simplistic and reductionist paradigm in the epistemological conception of political praxis, furthermore, is insulting to the capacity of human cognition. As the diversity of life is ruled out so, too, is the range of human conception reduced. Ulrich Beck talks of the cognitive imprisonment of the ecological movement because of this dominance of a ‘naturalistic misunderstanding’.36 For ecology, too, is subject to the reductionist and dualistic forces inherent in the paradigm of Western social science. Wolfgang Sachs warns of the inherent reductionism in official approaches that adopt ecological notions. He terms this ‘ecocratic discourse’ since ‘environment’ is seen to be synonymous with ‘development’. So it champions ‘the logic of competitive productivism’, reducing ‘ecology to a set of managerial strategies aiming at resource efficiency and risk management.’37 This is the result of the inherent tension within ecology between the progression of scientific thought, from anti-reductionistic organicism through mechanistic empiricism to systems theory focusing upon homeostatic interdependence between units and the whole that relate back to the original holistic tradition and the quasi-spiritual/metaphysical dimension of ecology. This has left both legitimation for Baconian control of nature and a powerful argument using the logics of modernity for sensitive re-examination of all interconnected relations on this earth. This can translate also into mutual incomprehension; for example, the difference between the Chipko women who wished to preserve the living integrity of their forest environment and the state-funded bureaucrats whose ‘expertise’ resulted in the labelling of the forests as part of India’s ‘environment’ thereby conferring upon it the characteristic of a reserve for resource collection.38 Evidently there was not a shared ‘mental image of social reality’.39 Epistemologically distinguishing between scientific ecology and metaphysical ecology40 does not help. Instead, an ecological paradigm holds the potential to resist such divisive categorisation. Furthermore, the ‘epistemological relativity’ of the concept of nature (and accordingly what is natural), overlain as it is with scientific, ‘cultural, ideological and moral meanings’, confounds singular conceptualisation.41 Any Cartesian dichotomised distinctions between the natural and human realms and inducing further dichotomised understandings were constructed upon and defined by a view that chose not to recognise that the natural and the human evolved symbiotically; that adaptation and transformation mutually developed according to the intricate interaction of processes emanating from both sides of the dualism. The human–nature dualism of Western thought is interconnected with other pervasive metatheoretical dualisms that hold normative value, namely masculine–feminine, reason–emotion/spirituality and other

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similar oppositional polarisations.42 To maintain these distinct positions requires constant metaphysical, ethical and political justification. For dichotomisation denies the inseparable, synergistic interdependence of humans and other relations within this whole earth. An ecological perspective conflates the Cartesian polarised philosophy, whereby nature is conceptually located as an external ‘other’ which humanity transcends. However, a fusion of the binary results in the internalisation of the concept of the natural. This translates into the ‘cognitive propensity’ to essentialise. For example, to postulate that women, on account of their capabilities of giving birth and nurturing children, are characteristically closer to the natural domain and further removed from the abstracted cultural world of mankind. Further, essentialised phenomena are culturally equivocal, specifying ambiguously divergent characteristics: nature may be wild, malign, wilful and ordered, benign and fragile. ‘These things do not simply allow us to locate things in the world but to morally evaluate them as well. To say something is unnatural is to condemn it as reprehensible.’43 As a result, semantics, which are culturally contingent, rule varied and eclectic epistemological understandings of an ontological reality. For nature, the root of ecology, is not immune to the ambiguities of language ‘and language is not dependable . . . As such, nature brought into political life, into language, can hardly remain “natural” ’.44 That ecological terms sometimes become used as slogans in mainstream politics that renders them open to misinterpretation is also inevitable.45 Even within the ecological camp differences and mistrust may arise.46 For, conceptual distinctions are merely heuristic devices.47 Analytical gradations are required to accommodate the terminology to the listener and to be adaptive to the conditions of the local culture and the local natural history.48 Thus, the rapid demise of human languages around the world in the everincreasing globalising urge to create ‘one world’ further impoverishes the human capability to account for the ecological diversity of this earth.49 This cultural impoverishment, parallel to ecological depletion, reduces our ability to perceive and reflect upon the fundamental relationships of this world in a plurality of diverse and complex ways.50 The cognitive distancing of nature, processed as ‘wilderness’ in terms of landscape, or the ‘other’ in opposition to the (human) ‘self ’, comes into effect with Baconian legitimation for a controlling and utilitarianistic attitude towards the environment and Cartesian justification for such usage of humankind’s periphery. Ascribing ontological value to this particular cultural understanding of relationships within the domain of nature, that is, a Westernised notion, undermines the lived realities of, in particular, third- and fourth-world peoples whose culture embraces nature.51 Rather, ‘[n]ature is a co-construction among humans and nonhumans’ and our ability to interpret this requires linguistic and political effort.52 For the ability to articulate an ecological paradigm facilitates the capability to politicise it. Even so, it remains epistemologically ambivalent. This further confounds normal procedures, in the Kuhnian sense, from which


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to politicise an ecological perspective. However problematic and initially inimical an ecological perspective, its holistic openness does not mitigate its inherent political input.

Elusive nature: the difficulty of politicising an ecological paradigm An ecological paradigm is empirically grounded by the physical material being of the ecological sphere. However this ontological base is variable according to context and time. Epistemological understanding of this base is filtered culturally and ideologically. So, for example, we may interpret the same context along a continuum from a ‘nature-endorsing’ position or its ‘nature-sceptical’ response.53 The temptation to slip back to dichotomous interpretations, such as a distinction between the ‘real’ world, not yet systematically polluted by the modern paradigm of science, and its end result, the ‘surrogate’ world54 needs to be resisted. So too, a slippage into neoKantianism, that is, a sensitive problematising of the nature debate from the privileged vantage of humanity.55 In contrast, Donna Haraway theorises from a position where the concept of ‘nature’ is freed from solely human possession. Instead, it is reclaimed as ‘a commonplace’ and site of ‘public discourse’, co-constructed by humans and nonhumans. Accordingly, theoretical debate concerning whether ‘nature’ is purely ontological or artifice is released by accepting that ‘nature . . . is made’.56 The difficulty of cognitively capturing the fact that nature is not elsewhere leads Haraway to personify nature as ‘coyote’ or a ‘potent trickster’ because it is simultaneously a human concept yet also not amenable to human rationalising;57 ‘always problematic’,58 whatever its signification or embodiment, and never amenable to reductionist objectification. Instead of allowing the ‘cynical’ turn of the concept of nature to be manipulated into a simplistic and/or technocratic translation of ecology, whereby in the end, we are left with ‘a struggle over the real’59 an ecological paradigm prioritises context. That is, spatial, temporal and psychological context is pivotal in order to transcend a particular culture’s normalising procedures. For example, indigenous people often have retained a consciousness and moral comprehension of the interconnected relationships and various conceptualisations of the individual, community and earth. Acknowledgment by the North American Indians that the salmon in the river evolved alongside themselves entails a respect for the salmon, not just an objective source of food, but as ‘literal embodiments of the wisdom of the locale . . . The Indians understood that the salmon’s gift involved them in an ethical system that resounded in every corner of their locale’.60 This world-view corresponds to the etymological root of ecology which locates humanity ‘‘‘at home” in nature’; a place where psychological integrity is inextricably bound with environmental integrity.61 That is, nature is not an elusive epistemological concept, nor is it a remote ‘place to visit, it is home –

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and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places’.62 Further, the history of human evolution tells the story of humanity’s relationship with nature. So to destroy the base of life is to destroy the continuation of this story: the future; inversely, sustaining the ecophysical base of life sustains the diversity of life. To forestall a calamitous ending, possibly an ‘inhuman’ solution is required; certainly revised notions of humanity’s place in nature is required.63 The inescapable conclusion is that humanity is inextricably and densely involved with the natural world. That humanity has the capability of reflecting and acting upon the consequences of this involvement brings us to the area of conservation. This concern was the impetus for Aldo Leopold who despaired of the instrumental divorce of life from place and wished to reinstill a sense of respect in our relations with the land as the source of an ecological revisioning of our ethical and actual relations. He regarded conservation as a practice arising from a philosophy contrary to the ‘Abrahamic concept of land’, that is, the belief that land is a ‘commodity’ to be used as an object or means of capital accumulation. Instead, Leopold suggested that if land were to be regarded ‘as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect’.64 Thus practice and ethics are brought together by a metatheory that values the land. Economic utilitarianism is rejected and the possibility of perceiving mutually qualitative relations is found. Accordingly, life may be reviewed in the form of energy flowing throughout a ‘biotic pyramid’, which is contingently constructed from the smallest ‘organism’ with an inherent capacity for self-renewal and maintenance of health and/or equilibrium to the cumulative land/community, which, itself, is a vital body. Human beings are merely one interdependent evolutionary link in the midst of this chain. The consciousness of this entails a ‘deeper’ ‘sketch’ of life and an ‘ecological necessity’ to promote the establishment of an integrally holistic community of interdependent human and nonhuman actors residing, interactively and dynamically upon a biotic organism. Such an ecological understanding of the genesis of the complex interconnectedness of the natural world involves ethical considerations with political norms. The congruence between ontology and epistemology also allows for a ‘view of reality [which] is basic to our ethic’.65 This contrasts with the modern trajectory of social science that has either been constructed upon an omission of ethics from political epistemology or a Kantian notion of politics, which interjects ethical norms to political thought presuming that only (responsible) humans articulate and fulfil ethical choices. When applied to the consideration of an ecological dimension, it is accepted that it is in the ultimate interests of human life to sustain the ecological fabric of the environment yet retains Cartesian and Newtonian metaphysics. John Passmore, by adopting the Stoic-Christian tradition that insists upon the ‘absolute uniqueness of man’, follows this approach whereby nature is that domain external to human


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society: ‘the strange life of beasts and plants which lies around us’.66 Though, not doubting the interdependent unity of the biosphere, where ‘men, plants, animals’ comprise ‘a single community’, politics is found to be otherworldly; of that community ‘which generates rights, duties, obligations’.67 This insistence upon the autonomy of humanity from nature necessarily incites an environmentalist or ‘stewardship’ attitude toward nature. This ‘responsibility’ could be regarded as cosmically onerous, thereby generating ‘societal guilt’68 for stewardship entails pure knowledge and co-operation; indeed, a certain amount of hubris to think we can manage the earth.69 Thus, legal moves to protect ‘natural objects’ fail on both counts of metaphysical reliance upon Cartesian dichotomisation and the onerous responsibility implicated.70 Instead, an alternative epistemological base for normative action is required. An axiomatic problem is the attribution of value.

Re-orientating values The principal difference between an ecological ethic and associated political norms and those advocated by dominant social theories is the locus of value. The latter are constructed according to the prevalently held belief that humans, solely, intrinsically possess value and accredit instrumental forms of value to other nonhumans and elements of the environment. An ecological paradigm can be said to challenge this ‘pervasive metaphysical ethical anthropocentrism that has dominated Western culture with classical Greek humanism and the Judæo-Christian tradition since its inception’.71 By disputing human supremacy, an ecological perspective opens up theorisation to include the principle of biospherical egalitarianism. This is an ethos respecting the inherent value of all vital relations and relationships within the world; implying a reverence for life, awareness of the cyclical nature of creation and recreation and reflection upon the purpose of being, as well as recognition of our entwined, interdependent destinies. In effect, ecological thinking is essentially monistic; the Cartesian separation between spirit and matter is unified. The Gaian hypothesis that life on earth constitutes one single alive organism is the pre-eminent example of monistic ecological politics. The earth-organism is autopoietic, that is, is able to regulatively sustain its life, and all relations within reactively contribute to the life of the whole discrete system.72 Accordingly, behavioural principles and regulating laws do exist, reflecting the co-dependent and cooperative relationships within nature. This perspective regards humanity’s input as negligible: Gaia does not need humanity, although humanity is needy of Gaia. This view radically revises both personal and communitarian understandings of identity. Subsequently, the place of humanity is resi(gh)ted – physically, spiritually and cognitively. Not only are the biospherical interconnected relationships illuminated but also reflection upon these draws attention to the metaphysical nature of our interdependence in this organic cosmos. Henry

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David Thoreau, an individualist who believed in the importance of cultivating one’s self according to the integrity of nature and whose sworn allegiance was to this singular relationship and its inherent spiritual freedom before all else, advocated simplicity and responsibility.73 The latent intellectual growth and spiritual awakening involved has since provided inspiration for many ecological thinkers, including Warwick Fox and Freya Mathews.74 Both authors philosophise upon the connections between ecological context and self-identification. Fox’s experience-based ‘transpersonal ecology’ advocates personal, ontological and cosmological awareness that we all inhabit a ‘single unfolding process’75 wherein ‘the freedom of all entities to unfold in their own ways’ needs to be respected. Practically, this impels life-styles that ‘tread lightly’ upon the natural environment as well as a conviction to ‘respectfully but resolutely attempt to alter the views and behavior of those who persist in the delusion that self-realization lies in the direction of dominating the earth and the myriad entities with which we coexist’.76 Although Fox recognises that it may be politically expedient to use anthropocentric arguments to preserve a specific species of wild animal or plot of nature, in the long term ‘one is contributing to losing the ecological war by reinforcing the cultural perception that what is valuable in the nonhuman world is what is useful to humans’.77 Mathews focuses upon the expansive notion of the self (cosmic globe to particular individual) finding that identity is predetermined relative to a specific self and its capabilities to regulate life within its ecological context, for example, [T]he identity of the Blue Whale is . . . irreducibly ecological – it cannot be exhausted by anatomical and physiological inventions . . . It is precisely the extra-ecological dimension that distinguishes the self from mere objects and stuffs, and this ecological interrelatedness is a function of its telos.78 The problem with conceptual work concentrating upon identification is that the onus is placed upon personal transformation and structural critique of political practice is avoided; the political potential of an ecological perspective is bypassed.79 So personal and psychic absorption of values and feelings may allow one to empathise, yet political response is internalised and diffused. From this accusation follows the criticism that deep ecological expressions amount, ultimately, to nothing more than an expression of secular humanism and do little to effectively counter the dominant ‘scientific-empiricist’ perspective. In fact, self-aware humanism is the minimum standard for the potential emergence of an ecological society.80 Deep ecology needs to expound a coherent framework binding ethics, cosmology and eschatology.81 From this point of view, the spiritual dimension of ecology is integral,


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incorporating awareness of the impermanence yet also the responsibility of humanity.82 Some deep ecologists endow nature with divine potential and revere the spirit of Gaia;83 a ‘touch of nature makes the whole world kin’,84 said John Muir, hailed as the ‘father’ of the ‘modern environment movement’ and ‘foremost conservationist of his time’.85 This ‘profound spiritual attachment’ may inform a metaphysical base for political praxis.86 The ‘central moral priority’ of Earth First!, a radical ecological movement, is the protection of wilderness imbued with spiritual values, according to an ethos of biocentrism.87 Biocentrism challenges the hierarchical ordering of value within the modern political paradigm legitimated by Judæo-Christianity. The secular interpretation of this hierarchical ordering into one of anthropocentric deception is disturbed when an ecological re-attunement of places and relations within this one world is posited. (God, who once inhabited the pinnacle position, has gradually been evicted and humanity, according to Baconian science, has become the supreme driving force.) Thus, the reality of the interconnectedness of all living systems means that ultimately there is no limit to the reverberations of one’s activities: there are no separate, objective relations to exploit and ‘no away to throw things to’.88 An ‘ethic of attunement’ is required because ‘we are within life, not above it’.89 Christian ecological thinkers discuss this debate. From the recognition that nature has not infrequently been a ‘human artefact’, Lynn White Jnr. has argued that Judæo-Christian axioms about humanity’s relationship with nature had provided substantive foundations to the rationalisation of the Western traditions of science and technology, which in turn were furthered by liberalism. Thus a linear and progressive notion of time with an anthropocentric, utilitarian perspective towards the environment vindicated a dualism between humanity and nature. As such Christianity should bear ‘a huge burden of guilt’ for the accelerating ecological crisis wrought by humankind upon an objectified nature.90 Subsequently, ecological crisis will not be averted through the application of more science or technology, but only via a reappraisal of our ideas of the relationship between humanity and the world’s ecosystem. One response to this accusation has been from a perspective of ‘the integrity of creation’ whereby humanity partakes in humble responsibility for the natural world. The argument is that both ecology and theology demand a metanoia, that is, fundamental questioning, of society’s epistemological foundations.91 However, where nature is seen to embody hope, the eschatological premises of Christianity may be challenged, but this position also allows Christians to have faith for the future of human destiny. So John Haught advocates a ‘process-relational cosmology’, borrowed from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, where nature is invested with divine cosmological purpose with an inherent promise.92 A Buddhist perspective is dismissive of hierarchisation and values the potential inherent in all life forms. Politicisation of such an ethos requires a

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transcendental self-consciousness of being and an immanently critical awareness of the earth and its incremental destruction. Such a stance marries spiritual consciousness and practical activity to ensure individual psychological and ecological integrity; for ‘if we are to be here and whole, we do need to be earthed, instead of minds dangling on the ends of our bodies or suspended in some romantic spiritual evasion’.93 Charlene Spretnak draws together themes from both Judæo-Christianity and Buddhism, regarding them as the most influential ‘wisdom traditions’ of contemporary, global society, to re-engage in dialogue spirituality with the practical concerns of life so that the community of this earth may be conceptually liberated and degeneration of life be brought to demise.94 However, a reverence for life, in a holistic sense, is only found within the ancient religions of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, where nondiscriminatory compassion is axiomatic to belief. Thus that an ecological perspective is inherently spiritual should be explicit; ‘to hear within ourselves the sound of the Earth crying’95 requires a consciousness of self as ephemerally interconnected within the integral universe of life that incites more than a mental realisation. An ecological perspective requires a degree of spirituality and self-awareness radically disturbing the metaphysical and theoretical principles of traditional epistemological lenses. This has practical repercussions. For to realign political praxis with Stoic metaphysics of deep ecology, that is, to rediscover that a metaphysical attitude, whereby inner peace is indivisible from the ordering found within one’s surrounding natural environment, fundamentally challenges the Epicurean metaphysics of liberal political philosophies. This latter axiomatic premise is founded upon a continual transcendence of physical and social life conditions and a prioritising of abstracted contemplation.96 The two sides of this argument result in the difference between the pole positions of the environmental/ ecological political debate.

Shall we paddle or dive in? Theorising upon an ecological perspective An ecological perspective allows for discussion of the relationships between all forms of organic life and their environmental surroundings. This nonanthropocentric (or ecocentric) approach considers all relations to have intrinsic value and to be worthy irrespective of their resource capabilities to humans. All residents within the shared environmental community share the mutually respected right to develop and flourish in their own specific, diverse fashions.97 In contrast, an anthropocentric approach deems human fulfilment to be the prime requisite of political interaction with the environment and other residents of the landscape. The nonhuman world is considered to hold value only insofar as humans can usefully exploit it; its worth is dependent upon the value humans credit it with and vital elements of the nonhuman world exist only as means to enrich the human world and not as


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ends in themselves. However, these two positions approach each other when it is conceded that humanity has the moral responsibility and capabilities to benefit, spiritually and materially, in the long term. This entails a transformation of humanity’s relationships, without simultaneously violating the integrity of other organisms.98 Politically, an anthropocentric approach to the environment can only be manifested as reformist of the dominant social paradigm. Thus, if the term, environmentalism, is to be shared by both anthropocentric and ecocentric strands of thought, it needs to be recognised that there is a ‘reformist’ tendency that regards environmental problems as fragmented, technical questions and another ‘revolutionary’ stream which seeks ‘a new metaphysics, epistemology cosmology and environmental ethics of person/planet’.99 This division between ‘deep’ ecology or ecocentric theory and ‘shallow’ ecology or environmentalism was first propounded by the self-proclaimed deep ecologist, Arne Naess, and thus infers a divisive dualism between the deep and the shallow perspectives. According to Naess, the adjective ‘deep’ is used to indicate publicly the need to question, ‘ ‘‘why” more insistently and consistently, taking nothing for granted’.100 Naess’ division between shallow and deep forms of environmentalism has been compared to Wittgenstein’s metaphorical allusion for ordinary thinking as swimming on the surface whereas diving into depths requires more effort.101 In a discipline, claiming to be interdisciplinary, even monistic, and with the goal of holistic sustainability, this internally ascribed dichotomy may seem curious. It is the result of finding itself located in the fundamental origin of all political thinking – that of the nature–human dilemma. According to Naess, the ‘shallow’, ecological movement may be more powerful within orthodox political debate on the basis of its relative conformity, whereas he concedes that the deep ecology movement may be, at first, a ‘less influential movement’. For the ‘shallow ecology movement’ is concerned with pollution and depletion of global resources with respect to its central interest of human welfare. Whereas, the ‘deep ecology movement’ rejects this picture of humans superimposed on the environment and promotes a problematic image of that of the ‘relational, total-field’ of ‘[o]rganisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations’.102 The holistic or ‘gestalt’103 perspective of deep ecology embodies the multifarious principles of ‘biospherical egalitarianism’, ‘diversity’, ‘symbiosis’, an appreciation of ‘complexity’, classlessness, and ‘local autonomy and decentralisation’, besides concern over growing resource scarcity and pollution levels. These principles of ecological philosophy, or ‘ecosophy’, are intended to be transparently normative – to illustrate ‘political potentials’. Such a metaphysical position loosely draws upon Ghandi’s notion of Bhagavadgita, progressing from intuitive ‘wisdom’ to a system of ‘S/self-realisation’ so that, in practice, ecosophy is ‘a philosophical world-view or system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere’.104 It is said to offer

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Understandings of an ecological perspective the basis of a new ontology which posits humanity as inseparable from nature. If this ontology is fully understood, it will no longer be possible for us to injure nature wantonly, as this would mean injuring an integral part of ourselves. From this ontological beginning, ethics and practical action are to fall into place.105

Inspired by ‘the unrealised potential’ of humanity,106 which combined with an attitude of philosophical pluralism that may be translated into practical respect for cultural diversity, Naess draws up a platform of deep ecology principles.107 Whilst acknowledging the theoretical dualism between deep and shallow forms of ecological activity, he unequivocally urges co-operation in the arena of political activity even if there exists dissent over the value and priority of policies.108 The primary point is that all life forms are given encouragement to flourish.109 Deep ecological maxims demand self-conscious responsibility, metaphysical critique and political action.110 They appeal indiscriminately and universally. For ‘we are all harmed by the ecological crisis and therefore we all have a common interest in uniting together with people of all classes and all political allegiances to counter this mutually shared threat’.111 Devall also presents fifteen ‘metaphysical-religious, psychological-epistemological, ethical, and socio-economic-political’ principles of deep ecology, reconceiving humanity within the ‘gestalt’ picture of ‘person-in-nature’ within the whole ecosphere, that is, ‘part of creation on-going’.112 Thus, the beginning is a metaphysical and cosmological re-analysis of the place of and integrity of one (human being) within the biospherical whole. This view of nature is formed from both experience and intuition with an understanding that ecosystems and constitutive processes exist in a fragile equilibrium, which humans can too easily and abruptly disrupt if there is no respect. Implicitly it requires an understanding that quality of existence does not equate with quantity of human-produced technological ‘improvements’. There is a realisation also of the need to balance human population numbers with the ‘carrying capacity’ of the lands of the planet. Consequently, the quick-fix solutions of shallow environmentalism, found within the existing political and economic paradigm, may in the long term be counter-productive or simply reflect attention away from the real underlying causes. Rather, there is a need for research into alternative notions of socio-political communities and philosophical inspiration, some of which may be drawn from pre-industrial hunting/gathering societies, where both cultural and biological diversity are recognised as important to the health and harmony of ecosystems. It rejects energy-intensive industrialisation and supports use of renewable resources of energy and ‘appropriate technology’ that is scaled to and integrated within the needs of a community. It promotes holistic education, that is, training people not merely for occupations but also allowing for personal spiritual development and appreciates all forms of art as expressions of individual and social understanding and flourishing. It is the belief of this


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approach that effective human communities are those where power is decentralised and local regions/councils have autonomy. Lastly, it advocates the protection of areas of wilderness from human development/exploitation. Government according to this manifesto is hypothesised to be ‘liberating, transforming, questing’ for all relations comprising society, where ecological consciousness is indivisible from political action.113 Critics of the shallow/deep distinction argue that ultimately ‘there may be little practical difference between a reconstituted, enlightened anthropocentrism and the aims of ecocentrism’.114 For it is difficult to put into practice and see the difference between the two positions from the point of view of the attribution of value which is the axiomatic basis for theoretical division.115 So viewed from the dominant socio-economic perspective of political practice, there exists a tension between the practice and the philosophy of deep ecology. In practice, a green spectrum (from environmentalism to deep ecology or ecologism) results in ‘minimalist’ action, for by including environmentalism, which is antithetical to ecologism, it becomes so broad as to divest the position of any radical meaning. It is feared that a convergence of reformist and radical environmental politics may ‘immunize rather than sensitize’ an ecological world-view since environmentalism is a malleable concept that may be accommodated within the dominant political apparatus.116 Instead, the biological tenet that demonstrates the value of diversity as a source of sustained strength within an ecosystem may be an epistemological foundation for political constructivism; where pluralistic diversity is held up as the political norm and any exclusive fascistic policies are rejected as illegitimate since they inherently deny the freedom and autonomy of difference and particularity.117 Ecologism derives from the recognition that there are natural, as opposed to socio-politically engineered, limits to growth; the carrying and absorbent capacities of this earth are finitely bounded. This was brought to public attention and has informed the current ecological movement by the 1972 report on The Limits to Growth.118 This publication provoked exhortation of radical changes concerning industrial development, fuelled by increasing resource usage and consumption, and encouraged consideration of a sustainable society in which the spiritual, as opposed to material, quality of life is also valued. Thus ecologism could be categorised as the refutation of the dominant ‘super-ideology’ of all societies, regardless of political belief systems, namely ‘industrialism’, that in turn legitimates the uni-directional accumulation of capital in exchange for natural materials.119 Those theorists who persist in perceiving environmentalism as a blanket term for a political continuum between two dominant ideological poles (e.g., technocentrism, that is the usage of environmental resources aided by a technologically-focused society, and ecocentrism) ultimately remain ensnared within the logic of a liberalist political paradigm and informed by anthropocentrism.120 Accordingly, an ecocentric approach cannot but be ‘politically most ambiguous’; the approach requires fundamental societal change via

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education.121 For radical ecology also constitutes an eclectic spectrum of perspectives with idealism, namely New Ageism, at one end and a materialist, eco-socialist reading at the other.122 An eco-socialist position is advocated by some to pre-empt eco-authoritarian co-option, as in the nationalistic pride of territorial space integral to Nazi ideology, and the misanthropic tendencies expressed by extremist conservationists within, for example, the group Earth First!123 Eco-socialists hope, thereby, to avoid ‘a repressive dystopia’ and simultaneously attempt to evade accusations of psychological and metaphysical ‘garbage’ emanating from deep ecology that ultimately normatively robs it of any substantial difference from reductionist environmentalism.124 Within the environmentalism/ecocentrism debate exist questions of participatory democracy and human survival. Robyn Eckersley reviews the overlapping positions of resource conservation, human welfare ecology, preservationism, animal liberation and ecocentrism within this broad political spectrum from these two fundamental beginnings. Although this depiction is similar to that drawn by theorists above, reflecting a progression from instrumental use to integral and holistic revaluation, she is concerned that such a theoretical description is not equated with actual linear development, nor infers a hierarchical progression.125 The affirmation of cultural diversity arising from biological diversity is adopted as a foundational political principle – where wilderness symbolises certain values such as sustained stasis, respect of difference, and equivalence of emancipation, within the bounds of a community, as well as a resistant block to modern society’s forces of monocultural (Western), material development. Eckersley’s ecocentric position ascribes the ontology of the natural world, which includes humans and our socially constructed artefacts, as the foundation of human epistemology, which is prior to human moralising and therefore not a factor for cognitive modification. The implication is that there remains the need for a radically revised metatheorisation. Politically, ecocentrism cannot be practised until culturally there is an awareness of the nature of the ecological wholeness of existence, alongside a forum of social emancipation and respect for the intrinsic quality of all diverse forms of vital energy. Atomism, that is the conferral of intrinsic value solely to isolated individuals, whether preached by anthropocentrics or animal liberationists, demands contextualisation. The basis of all living relations emerges from an understanding of their constitutive evolution with connected organisms, systems and the embedding natural whole.126 Such an epistemology fundamentally disturbs the dominantly reified vision of humans posing triumphantly upon nature and all nonhumans. Through these alternative lenses, ‘the world is an intrinsically dynamic, interconnected web of relations’.127 Context informs epistemology; an ecocentric perspective values ‘populations, species, habitats and ecosystems wherever situated and irrespective of their use value or importance to humans’.128 Politically, this means that ‘the question of our proper place in the rest of nature [is] logically prior to the


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question of what are the most appropriate social and political arrangements for human communities’.129 From recognition of the mutual interconnectedness of all ‘relatively autonomous beings’ arises the possibility of connecting ecological politics with communitarian/socialist political theories. So, ‘emancipation writ large’ emerges from ‘a positive affirmation of the fact of our embeddedness in ecological relationships’.130 This could be said to represent ‘the cumulative wisdom’ of the diverse strains of environmental political thought and their underlying philosophical, ethical and psychological foundations,131 particularly as an ecocentric perspective accords with the newer developments in scientific thought that improves our understanding of the cosmos as a ‘web of life’.132 Ideally the corresponding emergence of poststructuralism would have facilitated the articulation of dense, systems thinking science to further advance the cause of ecological consciousness. Poststructuralist theorisation, whereby concepts are freed from epistemological givens, would appear to coincide with an ecological perspective, better reflecting the diversity of ontological conditions. However, this is dependent upon acceptance of the value of the political concept of ecology. Regarding it as consigned to marginalised oblivion, because conventional thinking is uncomfortable with the interdisciplinary, uncategorisable nature of ecological politics, further reifies its tamed normalisation.133 A poststructuralist attempt to theorise an ecological perspective regards ontological locations as epistemological constructs: ‘quasi-subjective/quasiobjective hybrids’ in a state of denatured nature, where nature is a process of becoming and is a ‘built environment’, a ‘planned habitat’, a ‘wilderness preserve’, an ‘economic development’, or an ‘ecological disaster’.134 Whether the manipulation of terminology abets political praxis is disputable and differs little from the tension with the environmental–ecological continuum debate. However, such an approach is preferable to ideological manipulation of an ecological perspective theorisation from an authoritarian position. Alarmed at the direction and pace of environmental destruction, it is believed by some that only draconian, sometimes undemocratic measures remain at our political disposal. Unrelenting population growth is argued to be the prime reason for ecological catastrophe and needs to be stemmed in order to redress ecological equilibrium. If human rights are overridden, this is of lesser import than the greater prerogative of saving the base to future life. The writers of this bent are political realists, with all the associated pessimism of that reading of human worth and capabilities.135 Because the contemporary political system is found to be ‘ecologically defective’, a ‘fundamentally conservative orientation to the world’ is proposed.136 Such conservatism should be internalised, voluntarily: ‘we must learn ecological self-restraint before it is forced on us by a potentially monolithic and totalitarian regime or by the brute forces of nature’.137 This is political practice adapted to the conditions of scarcity.138 Indeed, it could be argued that, like Rousseau, these writers lament the inevitable destructiveness of human society as it has expanded.

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This Malthusian origin to political thinking is vividly illustrated by Garret Hardin who uses the metaphor of a lifeboat to convey understanding of the limited carrying capacity of earth alongside the cumulative increase in population numbers. To continue the analogy, the world thus becomes economically and politically divided since some boats have become swamped through overcrowding and overuse of resources; indeed, some inhabitants are floundering in the waters. Those that still have space in their boats represent the privileged of this world.139 Hardin advocates, changing metaphors, ‘slamming the door once . . . inside’ for the sake of the continuation of life in its present form of the future generations of the few lucky insiders, or, if exceptions, for example, political refugees, are to be allowed in, draconian control of birth-rights should be enforced.140 This argument is a continuation of his thesis that if humans are given unrestrained freedom, coupled with the political concept of equal rights, then the only outcome possible is a tragic over-exploitation of resources held in common.141 Since humanity is conceived in negative, political realist terms, co-operation and respect for the natural resources on the part of the people is not deliberated. Thus, humankind is essentially catastrophic for nature on the basis that ‘endless multiplication on a finite planet is impossible’. The only outcome foreseen is a future where ‘[h]uman values and institutions will bend or be crushed by biological and physical realities’.142 Multiple interactions with earth are condensed to a quantitative equation: total environmental damage equals population, times [multiplied by] the level of material affluence per person, times the environmental damage done by the technology we use to supply each bit of affluence.143 Despite dismissing technological fixes as inconsequential, ironically, the future envisioned is metaphorically technological; that of a ‘kind of Spaceship Earth’ with a streamlined crew.144 These theories based upon quantitative analysis were further substantiated by the Club of Rome’s mathematical modelling of the future of the world’s resources and expected consumption rates, according to five pivotal global factors – ‘accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment’.145 The Club of Rome realised that ‘a Copernican revolution of the mind’ was required to change the paradigmatic notions framing political governance if the communitarian prospect of sustained survival was to be effectively addressed.146 Interestingly, these conclusions corresponded with those of the US radical conservation group, the Sierra Club. In advocating the urgent need to readdress the momentum for exponential capital and population growth in a world of finite and rapidly exhausting resources and sink capacities, this equally authoritarian group from the radical end of the environmental


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spectrum also stated the need for a normative momentum towards ‘global equilibrium’ without simultaneously freezing global inequalities.147 An economist who addressed these problems was E. F. Schumacher.148 Starting from the ecophysical limitations of the world, recognised to incarnate momentum for socio-economic life, the importance of re-appropriating politics to the people was stressed. Schumacher continued the heritage of Peter Kropotkin, who in the nineteenth century, argued for a regeneration of small communities organised around the principle of self-sufficiency.149 The revolutionary message of his tome meant that Kropotkin felt, not unlike the quantitative modellers above, that he needed to support his argument with copious statistical appendices to rebut disbelief.150 A contemporary rendition of Kropotkin’s argument could be said to be provided by Murray Bookchin who advocates a ‘moral economy’ in opposition to the ‘market economy’ where ‘shared concern rather than private interest’ fosters the recovery of our humanity in a socially and ecologically mature world.151 Bookchin’s social ecology is an attempt to theoretically transcend the single issue pragmatism of environmentalism on the one hand, and the quasi-religious ‘fetishization’ of ‘Nature’ linked with an anti-humanism that does not rule out misanthropism, on the other hand.152 His primary concern is the place and role of humans and subsequent relations between humans. The relationships discovered are seen to embody a mutually positive dynamic and not a template for social relations; indeed, his quest is for the ‘dissolution of hierarchy’. Bookchin’s sensitivity to the vagaries and shades of differentiation within society contrasts strikingly with his caricaturisation of deep ecology as ‘mystical’ and symptomatic of ‘crude reductionism’.153 A later publication reveals anger at the presumed preponderance in green political thinking of vacuous mysticism and a dangerous misanthropism and issues a defence of humanity. In calling for a ‘socially critical vision’, which entails no wholesale acceptance of humanism but celebrates the ‘remarkable abilities’ of humans, he argues that we are ‘ethically obliged to develop a firm sense of responsibility to non-human beings and the planet as a whole’.154 Thus the dialectical duality between human societies and nature remains, even though the society may be less exploitative; he calls for ‘the “reenchanting” of humanity’, meaning respect for the potential within humanity to bring about ‘a rational, ecologically oriented, aesthetically exciting, and deeply humane world based on an ethics of complementarity and a society of sharing’.155 In this respect, Bookchin feels that humanity has far to progress to fulfil our human potential and until we become civilised we will experience testing social and ecological disturbances. The underlying spirituality of this line of thinking is not pitted against, or recognised as an alternative to, ecological mysticism, nor is there a denial of our animality, but a dialectic of transcendence, where the eventual goal of human freedom, primarily, but not exclusively, is proposed. All the above writers share, to a greater or lesser degree, a core assumption

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articulated by James Lovelock – that of the homeostatic equilibrium of the global ecosphere. Lovelock personified this discrete system, Gaia.156 This ecological perspective displaces the central, self-adopted role taken by humanity; a political and ethical act of disturbing significance. Naturalist literature has traditionally been written from this perspective and could be said to have had more impact upon popular consciousness than ecopolitical theoretical debate. Rachel Carson was a trailblazer in politicising naturalist literature. As a result she suffered personal criticism; her publication, Silent Spring, was vilified by interested supporters of chemical companies who took umbrage at her thesis of the incremental but wholesale poisoning of earth.157 Carson, a chemist, empirically recounted qualitative changes in the landscape. Silent Spring is documentation in beautiful prose of the indiscriminate and systematic chemical war on all life forms, inadvertently including our own, that severely interrupts the finely balanced ecological equilibrium thereby silencing the singing of birds that heralds the renewal of life each spring. This toxic meddling has not only poisoned our whole environment but also, in the process, not even achieved its objectives of eradicating ‘pests’. Carson revealed the interrelationships and interdependencies that the pest-controllers refused to see.158 The questions ignored were: Why should we ‘tolerate a diet of weak poisons’?; Why do we ‘live in a world which is just not quite fatal’?159 Carson could only answer that such an ‘unthinking bludgeoning of the landscape’ was founded upon a disposition that allowed no humility and a ‘singularly narrow’ ‘attitude towards plants’.160 Tom Athanasiou’s wide-ranging, empirical and polemical account is a contemporary version.161 He charts the loss of the earth’s soil, the privatisation of the seas and the structuring of ‘ ‘‘free trade”, though not freely chosen’.162 Written from the premise that ‘environmentalism is only now reaching its political maturity’,163 it is asserted that this ‘new ecology is unabashedly political, economically and technologically sophisticated, insistent about justice, intolerant of old simplicities, full of startling and dangerous questions’.164 He focuses upon ‘ecological dangers, which are global, gradual and diffuse’165 such as the depletion of the ozone layer, the build-up of carbon dioxide, the poisoning/salinisation of waters, the desertification of fertile soils, the death of species, the fact the in the US there is one car produced to every two babies born; ‘despite seas of rhetoric . . . not a single major aspect of the global ecological crisis has been reversed’.166 Further, states have become pawns to trans-national corporations who ‘play country against country, ecosystem against ecosystem’.167 Thus, it is accepted that ‘encouraging more migrations of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]’ . . . is entirely reasonable on economic grounds . . . because, for example, a carcinogen will have a larger effect ‘in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where


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under-five mortality is 200 per thousand’. Poor countries, then are ‘underpolluted’, . . . ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’.168 The despair induced by such paradigmatic violence can be balanced against the emergence of a backlash inspiring political praxis. In countering the threats of the anti-green movement and illustrating the opportunities that exist for a sustainable world featuring ‘democracy, equality and justice’, where decisions emerge from plural and diverse locations of ‘local empowerment’, hope for an inclusive politics returns.169

Conclusion An ecological perspective immediately calls into question the fundamental axis of Western ethics and political behaviour, that is, human chauvinism. The orthodox argument for human chauvinism rests upon the exclusive restriction of ethical norms to (certain) humans, contingent upon the human capability to conceptualise, articulate and act upon moral choices. This politically reified, ‘self-evident’ concept has been labelled ‘the Differential Imperative’ whereby human virtue is promoted upon ‘species-specific differentia’.170 This defence defines and aligns morality with physical characteristics and does not logically falsify the characteristics determining human chauvinism as uniquely attributable to all humans and never to nonhumans. It legitimates either ‘human apartheid’ or ‘human supremacy’ sanctioning exploitative behaviour.171 The logical consequence of this political paradigm depicts a future of diminishing relations. Such an impoverishment of the rich diversity of life is also a soul-destroying prospect; indeed, ‘ecology, at its best, has raised the full ambiguity of humanity’s present role’.172 However the move to an ecologically sensitive paradigm is determined by the dominantly accepted understanding of the nature of crisis. If problems are regarded as fragmented and unrelated the established paradigm can respond. However, if the interdependency between causes and effects are seen, then a paradigm shift may be indicated.173 A process of learning and of political re-attunement is needed, for this ‘ ‘‘receptive” capacity by itself does not lead to action’.174 Ecological political theory has been considered too weak to stand alone. It has been decried as falling short of promoting and being constitutive of a radically new paradigmatic perspective, on the basis of its need to combine with traditional political theories (conservatism, liberalism, socialism and feminism) in order to effectively respond to social issues not directly concerned with the environment.175 Alternatively, it has been suggested that the connection between the two disciplines of ecology and politics is problematic, tending to divest both of meaningful content: by juxtaposing the two, the emergent discipline limits the scope of politics and dilutes the form of

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ecology. Besides it may be more appropriately subsumed within the field of political economy.176 Conversely, ecology has been said to be on the verge of engulfing politics and economics, thereby expanding the notion of politics, according to the ‘allocation of values’.177 On the other hand, ecology ‘has become the motto of our age because it holds the promise of reuniting what has been sundered and of healing what has been wounded, in short of nurturing the whole’.178 Singularly, it is posited as holding the potential to provoke ‘a substantial reorientation of our whole civilisation’.179 For, ‘[d]eep ecology understands that some of the “solutions” of reform environmentalism are counter-productive.’180 The characteristic inherent in the concept of ecology that all these varying accounts share is one of the potential political power of ecology; the differences arise over whether that needs to be suppressed or expressed. An ecological perspective encompassing philosophical and religious articulations of one’s being and community that best maintains the health of the world’s ecosystem fundamentally extends politics as defined according to IR theorists. Awareness of ecological and social interdependence, derived from both intuition and experience of life within specific, yet inherently boundless contexts requires a transformation of dominantly accepted epistemological understandings. An ecological perspective may allow us to recognise the futility and arbitrariness of theoretical frames that implicitly uphold forms of violence and oppression. Ecological consciousness holistically opens out the domain of inclusive relations to include the organic ecosystem, vital nonhuman animals and political human animals. The distinctive characteristics of each dynamic entity and their particular capabilities are respected within the whole community, without the need for hierarchical ordering. Such contextual relativism may elevate particular beings at specific moments but all states-of-being are contingent upon the evolutionary flux of the whole ecosystem, wherein humanity retains a special moral responsibility to reflect upon our role and place within the global ecosystem for it is within our capability to do so. This implies ‘rethinking basic assumptions’ regarding political thinking and practice.181 It also implies rebutting environmentalism, which does not revoke humanity’s role of ‘conqueror’ (whether translated as steward or tyrant) but legitimates continuing exploitative behaviour within circumscribed limits. Instead, a deepening of ethics to incorporate an ecological consciousness reconnects the naturally possible harmony between people and the world. The enmeshed interdependence of energy flows between all members of the community, only some of which have been discerned via the study of ecological science, exists to maintain an equilibrium that humans cannot fully comprehend and conceptualise. Any abrupt interruption in the chain of events will produce unforeseen and, frequently, unseen but connected reactive (mal)adjustments. At first this may release an abundance of energy deceptively reassuring humans of our prowess. However ‘releases of biotic capital tend to becloud or postpone the penalties of violence’.182


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Ecocentric values and practical principles cannot be articulated, nor formulated according to a static doctrine, but vary depending upon the dynamics of the social actors involved within contingent and particular cultural/ ecophysical contexts. Theoretical reflection requires a flexible attitude to take into consideration the plurality and diversity of epistemologies and ontological contexts. The traditionally given political paradigm cannot accommodate this rich abundance: ‘Life requires difference; knowledge requires similarity.’183 In effect, the normalised distortion of life for politics constitutes a form of violence. In contrast, an ecological ethos arises from the contextual integrity of all life; to cite Leopold, a ‘thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.184 Refusing to atomise how we know life allows for a metaphysical re-visioning of an interconnected and complex cosmos that does not lend itself to simplistic, arbitrarily hierarchical categorisation. It is within our ability to broaden our egotistic concerns to empathise and identify with others. In the end, ethically and politically this evolutionary move is dependent upon an imaginative construction of the possible.185 Consequently, wariness or hostility towards ecological politics, based upon a notion that it amounts to ‘barbarism’ by undoing all human progression, is theorised from a base of extreme pessimism regarding the cognitive and actual creative forces of humankind with respect towards our living relations upon the organic global whole.186 Global integrity ultimately equates with ecological integrity; conversely, a healthy ecosphere will sustain the interconnected web of human and nonhuman life. The basis is respect for the precarious interrelated balance of diverse forms of vital energy. This leads to the thought that the term rationality requires reformulation to incite: sensitivity to the conditions under which we exist on the earth, one which recognises and accommodates the denied relationships of dependency and enables us to acknowledge our debt to the sustaining others of the earth. This implies creating a democratic culture beyond dualism, ending colonising relationships and finding a mutual, ethical basis for enriching co-existence with earth others. We can realign reason not with the master formations of elite control and the rational egoism which fails to recognise the other as a limiting principle, but with social formations built on radical democracy, co-operation and mutuality. We can explore the rationality of the mutual self, the self which can take full joy in the flourishing of others, which can acknowledge kinship but also feast on the other’s resistance and grow strong on their difference.187 Thus an ecological perspective incites ‘an enlargement’ of reason;188 where it is logical to replace our role as ‘conqueror’ with that suggested by Leopold of ‘biotic citizen’. Then perhaps political enlightenment will come with maturity of ecological understanding.

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Notes 1 Midgley, M. (1983b) ‘Duties concerning Islands’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 101. 2 Cf. Schwarz, W. and Schwarz, D. (1998) Living Lightly: Travels in Post-Consumer Society, Charlby, Oxfordshire: Jon Carpenter Publishing. 3 Glacken, C. J. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 4 Marsh, G. P. (1965, first published in 1864) Man and Nature, London: Oxford University Press; Worster, D. (1988) ‘The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History’, The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5 Cited variously: Bramwell, A. (1989) Ecology in the 20th Century: A History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Brennan, A. (1988) Thinking about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value and Ecology, Athens: The University of Georgia Press; Dobson, A. (1995, 2nd ed.) Green Political Thought, London: Routledge. 6 White, L. Jnr. (1967) ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science, 155 (3767) pp. 1203–1207. 7 Worster, (1988). 8 Francis Bacon quoted by Worster, (1988) p. 20. 9 Bramwell, (1989) p. 4. 10 Bramwell, (1989) pp. 16–18. 11 Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring, London: Hamish Hamilton. 12 Pepper, D. (1984) The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm. 13 Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, London: UCL Press, p. 8. 14 Conley, V. A. (1997) Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought, London: Routledge. 15 Sessions, G. (1987) ‘The Deep Ecology Movement: A Review’, Environmental Review, 9, 105–125, pp. 120–121. 16 Kuhn, T. S. (1970) (2nd ed.) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, London: The University of Chicago Press. 17 Rodman, J. (1977) ‘The Liberation of Nature?’ Inquiry, 20, 83–145, p. 113. 18 Merchant, C. (1992) Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, London: Routledge. 19 Rodman, (1977) pp. 113–114 and 116–117, respectively. 20 Rodman, J. (1980) ‘Paradigm Change in Political Science: An Ecological Perspective’, American Behavioral Scientist, 24 (1) 49–78, p. 73. 21 Capra, F. (1983) The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture, London: Flamingo. 22 Catton, W. R. and Dunlap, R. E. (1980) ‘A New Ecological Paradigm for PostExuberant Sociology’, American Behavioral Scientist, 24 (1), 15–47. 23 Routley, R. (1983) ‘Roles and Limits of Paradigms in Environmental Thought and Action’, in Elliot, R. and Gare, A. (eds) Environmental Philosophy, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, p. 284. 24 Naess, A. (1973) ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary’, Inquiry, 16 (1), 95–100, p. 98; Capra, F. (1996) The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, London: HarperCollins Publishers. 25 Devall, B. (1980) ‘The Deep Ecology Movement’, Natural Resources Journal, 20 (2), 299–322, p. 299.


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26 Milbrath, L., Downes, Y. and Miller, K. (1994) ‘Sustainable Living: Framework of an Ecosystemically Grounded Political Theory’, Environmental Politics, 3 (3), 421–444, p. 442. 27 Kuhn quoted in Catton and Dunlap, (1980) p. 31. 28 Devall, (1980), pp. 316–317 and Devall, B. and Sessions, G. (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc. 29 Goldsmith, E. (1990) ‘Evolution, Neo-Darwinism and the Paradigm of Science’, The Ecologist, 20 (2), 67–73. 30 Gudynas, E. (1995) ‘The Fallacy of Ecomessianism: Observations from Latin America’, in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books Ltd. 31 Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 301. 32 Kuhn, (1970). 33 Devall, (1980). 34 Seed, J. (1988) ‘Invocation’, Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards A Council of All Beings, London: heretic books. 35 Macy, J. (1988) ‘Our Life as Gaia’, in Seed, J., Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards A Council of All Beings, London: heretic books. Also Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 36 Beck, U. (Weisz, A., trans.) (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity Press, ch. 2. 37 Sachs, W. (1992a) ‘Environment’, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, pp. 35–36. 38 Sachs, (1992a). 39 Devall, (1980) p. 300. 40 Brennan, (1988) pp. 31–38. 41 Ellen, R. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Ellen, R. and Fukui, K. (eds) Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, Oxford: Berg, p. 1. 42 Plumwood, V. (1993a) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge; summarised in Plumwood, V. (1993b) ‘Feminism and Ecofeminism: Beyond the Dualistic Assumptions of Women, Men and Nature’, Society and Nature, 2 (1), 36–51. This is explored further in ch. 4. 43 Ellen, (1996) p. 9. 44 Chaloupka, W. and McGreggor Cawley, R. (1993) ‘The Great Wild Hope: Nature, Environmentalism, and the Open Secret’, in Chaloupka, W. and Bennett, J. (eds) In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment, London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 5. 45 Naess, (1986). 46 Tokar, B. (1988) ‘Social Ecology, Deep Ecology and the Future of Green Political Thought’, The Ecologist, 18 (4/5), 132–141; Chase, S. (ed.) (1991) Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Boston, MA: A Learning Alliance Book from South End Press. A dialogue between Bookchin and Chase starts off rather acrimoniously but concludes harmoniously because both listen, thereby modifying their views or by learning to accept and respect their differences. 47 Vincent, A. (1993) ‘The Character of Ecology’, Environmental Politics, 2 (2), 248–276. 48 Norton, B. G. (1991) Toward Unity Among Environmentalists, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 250–251. 49 Sachs, W. (1992b) ‘One World’, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, Ltd. 50 Also Norberg-Hodge, H. (1991) Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh,

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51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

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Understandings of an ecological perspective London: Rider, for an account of the destruction of Ladakhi culture by Western consumerist forces that is leading to the abandonment of the land and erosion of the ability to be self-sufficient from the land. Dwyer, P. D. (1996) ‘The Invention of Nature’, in Ellen, R. and Fukui, K. (eds) Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, Oxford: Berg. Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 207. Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers Ltd., p. 3. Goldsmith, E. (1988a) The Great U-Turn: De-industrialising Society, Bideford: Green Books. Also Goldsmith, E. (1988b) ‘The Way: An Ecological World-view’, The Ecologist, 18 (4/5), 160–185 which is the ‘tentative’ summary of Goldsmith, E. (1996) The Way: an Ecological World-view, Totnes: Themis Books. Soper, (1995). Haraway, D. J. (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (eds) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, p. 297. Haraway, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books Ltd., p. 3. Haraway, (1991) p. 201. Chaloupka, W. (1993) ‘Cynical Nature: Politics and Culture after the Demise of the Natural’, Alternatives 18, 141–169, p. 163. Quoted by Cheney, J. (1989) ‘Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative’, Environmental Ethics, 11 (2), 117–134, pp. 122–123. Toulmin, S. (1982) The Return to Cosmology: Post Modern Science and The Theology of Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 260. Snyder, G. (1990) ‘The Etiquette of Freedom’, in Snyder, G. (ed.) The Practice of the Wild, New York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 7. McKibben, B. (1989) The End of Nature, London: Anchor Books, Doubleday. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. viii–ix. Dodson Gray, E. (1994) ‘Come Inside the Circle of Creation: The Ethic of Attunement’, in Ferré, F. and Hartel, P., Ethics and Environmental Policy: Theory Meets Practice, London: The University of Georgia Press, p. 21. Passsmore, J. (1975a) ‘Attitudes to Nature’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–130 (emphasis added). Passmore, (1975a) p. 140. Bramwell, (1989) p. 248. Lovelock, J. (1995) (2nd ed.) The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, C. D. (1974) Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, Los Altos, California: William Kaufman, Inc. Sessions, (1987) p. 105. Lovelock, J. E. (1979) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Lovelock, (1995). I am specifically referring to Walden; however, his writings now amount to over twenty volumes; Meyer, in Thoreau, H. D. (1983) Walden and Civil Disobedience, with an introduction by Michael Meyer, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. (Walden was first published in 1854; ‘Civil Disobedience’, first published in 1849.) Fox, W. (1990) Toward A Transpersonal Ecology; Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism, London: Shambhala Publications, Inc.; Mathews, F. (1991) The Ecological Self, London: Routledge. Fox, (1990) see chapter 8 in particular; quotation, p. 252.

Understandings of an ecological perspective 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

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Fox, (1990) p. 268. Fox, (1990) p. 186. Mathews, (1991) chapter 4, quotation, pp. 123–124. Plumwood, (1993a). Jones, K. (1993) Beyond Optimism: A Buddhist Political Ecology, Oxford: Jon Carpenter Publishing. Cf. Skolimowski, H. (1988) ‘Eco-Philosophy and Deep Ecology’, The Ecologist, 18 (4/5), 124–127. Taylor, B. (1991) ‘The Religion and Politics of Earth First!’, The Ecologist, 21(6), 258–266. Also Gottlieb, R. S. (ed.) (1996) This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, London: Routledge; Spretnak, C. (1991) States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age, New York: HarperCollins Publishers; Seed, J. (1988) Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards A Council of All Beings, London: heretic books. Cf. Seed, (1988). Muir, J. (December 1898) ‘Among the Birds of the Yosemite’, Atlantic Monthly, p. 753 and Our National Parks, p. 218 quoted in Browning, P. (ed.) (1988) John Muir In His Own Words: A Book of Quotations, Lafayette, California: Great West Books, p. 61. Muir, J. introduced by Graham White (1996) The Wilderness Journeys, Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., p. iv; Browning, (1988), p. viii. Muir was co-founder of the Sierra Club, influencing policy that inaugurated the establishment of conservation areas in the US. Manes, C. (1990) Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilisation, Boston, Toronto and London: Little, Brown & Co., p. 149. Taylor, (1991). Dodson Gray, (1994) pp. 25–26. Dodson Gray, (1994) p. 27. White, (1967) p. 1206. For example, Watson, M. (1994) ‘Christianity and the Green Option in the New Europe’, in Fulton, J. and Gee, P. (eds) Religion in Contemporary Europe, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd.; also Passmore (1980). Haught, J. F. (1993) The Promise of Nature: Ecology and Cosmic Purpose, New Jersey: Paulist Press. Jones, (1993) p. 98. Spretnak, (1991). Seed, (1988) ‘Introduction: To Hear Within Ourselves the Sound of the Earth Crying’, p. 5. Toulmin, (1982). Fox, (1990); Naess, A. (Rothenberg, D. trans. and ed.) (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benton, T. (1993) Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice, London: Verso; Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism, London: Cassell; Hayward, T. (1995) Ecological Thought: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press; Soper, (1995). Devall, (1980) p. 299. Naess A. (1986) ‘The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects’, Philosophical Inquiry, VIII (1–2), 10–29, p. 21. Naess, (1989). Naess, (1973) p. 95. Baruch Spinoza inspired Naess’ ‘gestalt’ lens of the environment. Naess, (1989) p. 38. Rothenberg in Naess, (1989) p. 2.

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106 Naess, (1989) p. 24. 107 Naess, A. (1988) ‘Deep Ecology and Ultimate Premises’, The Ecologist, 18 (4/5), 128–131. 108 See note to point 8 of the platform of deep ecology issues below, (1989) p. 31. 109 Naess, (1989). Also Naess A. (1986) ‘The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects’, Philosophical Inquiry, VIII (1–2), 10–29. 110 Cf. Sylvan, R. (1985a) ‘A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part 1,’ Radical Philosophy, 40, 2–12. 111 Tatchell quoted by Dobson, (1995) p. 23 (italics in original). 112 Devall, (1980) p. 303. 113 Devall, (1980) pp. 310–313 and p. 322. 114 Barry, J. (1994) ‘The Limits of the Shallow and the Deep: Green Politics, Philosophy, and Praxis’, Environmental Politics, 3 (3), 369–394, p. 387. 115 Sylvan, (1985a) and Sylvan, R. (1985b) ‘A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part 2’, Radical Philosophy, 41, 10–22. 116 Dobson, (1995) p. 199 and p. 210, respectively. 117 Dobson, A. (1994) ‘Ecologism and the Religitimation of Socialism’, Radical Philosophy, 67, 13–19. 118 Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. W. III (1974, first published in 1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, London: Pan Books Ltd. 119 Terms coined by Jonathon Porritt cited by Dobson, (1995) p. 30. 120 O’Riordan, T. (1981, 2nd ed.) Environmentalism, London: Pion Ltd. 121 Pepper, (1984). 122 Pepper, D. (1996) Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction, London: Routledge. 123 Pepper, (1996); Sylvan, (1985b). 124 Sylvan, (1985b). 125 Eckersley, (1992). 126 Cf. Benton, (1993). 127 Eckersley, (1992) p. 49. 128 Eckersley, (1992) pp. 42 and 46. 129 Eckersley, (1992) p. 28. 130 Eckersley, (1992) p. 53. 131 Eckersley, (1992) p. 179. 132 Capra, (1996). 133 Cf. Conley, (1997). 134 Luke, T. W. (1996) ‘Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of Environment, Bodies, and Nature’, Alternatives, 21, 1–30, pp. 10 and 6, respectively. 135 For an understanding of realism as one approach to political theory, see Viotti, P. R., and Kauppi, M. V. (1993 2nd ed.) International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism, New York: Macmillan. 136 Ophuls, W. and Boyan, A. S., Jnr., (1992) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited: The Unraveling of the American Dream, New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., pp. 282 and 295, respectively. 137 Ophuls and Boyan, (1992) p. 297. 138 Ophuls, W. (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co. 139 Hardin, G. (1974) ‘Living on a Lifeboat’, in Hardin, G. and Baden, J. (eds) (1977) Managing the Commons, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. 140 Hardin, (1974) p. 275. 141 Hardin, G. (1968) ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in Hardin, G. and Baden, J. (eds) (1977) Managing the Commons, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.


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142 Ehrlich, P. R., Ehrlich, A. H. and Holdren, J. P. (1973) Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., p. 3. Also, Ehrlich, P. R., and Ehrlich, A. H. (1970) Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co. 143 Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren, (1973) p. 12. 144 Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren, (1973) p. 279. This metaphor is borrowed from Kenneth Boulding, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’, in Jarrett, H. (ed.) (1966) Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 145 Meadows et al., (1974) p. 21. 146 Meadows et al., (1974) p. 196. 147 Meadows et al., (1974). 148 Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London: Blond and Briggs Ltd. Also Schumacher, E. F. (1977) A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. 149 Kropotkin, P. (Ward, C., ed.) (1974) first published 1899) Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 150 Colin Ward in Kropotkin, (1974). 151 Bookchin, M. (1986) The Modern Crisis, Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, in co-operation with the Institute for Social Ecology Rochester, Vermont, p. 94. 152 Bookchin, M. (1991, 2nd ed.) The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Montreal: Black Rose Books, p. xvii. 153 Bookchin, (1991) p. xxi. 154 Bookchin, (1995) p. 6. 155 Bookchin, (1995) p. 232. 156 Lovelock, (1979). 157 Carson, (1962). 158 It is interesting to note that only a decade later the Club of Rome sponsored the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mathematically model the world by computer and therefore provide ‘scientific’ answers to The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. (1974)) yet Carson’s own meticulous ‘scientific’ research was rubbished. 159 Asked by Paul Shepherd in the introduction to Silent Spring; Carson, (1962) p. 11. 160 Carson, (1962) p. 52. 161 Athanasiou, T. (1996) Slow Reckoning: The Ecology of a Divided Planet, London: Secker & Warburg. 162 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 152. An example being the continuation of the export of green beans from Ethiopia during 1984–85, the year of national famine resulting in the deaths of a million individuals. 163 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 3. 164 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 50. 165 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 31. 166 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 97. 167 Athanasiou, (1996) p. 196. 168 Lawrence Summers, chief economist to the World Bank in 1991, quoted by Athanasiou, (1996) p. 184. 169 Rowell, A. (1996) Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environment Movement, London: Routledge, p. 376. 170 Rodman, (1980) pp. 54–55. Also Routley, R. and Routley, V. (1979) ‘Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvianism’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 171 Terms coined by Sylvan, (1985a) p. 6. 172 Tokar, (1988) p. 137.

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173 174 175 176

Rodman, (1980). Rodman, (1977) p. 118. Martell, L. (1994) Ecology and Society; An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hayward, T. (1994) ‘The Meaning of Political Ecology’, Radical Philosophy, 66, 11–20. Ophuls and Boyan (1992) p. 9. Anon., (1992) ‘Whose environment?’, New Internationalist, 232, 20–22, p. 21. Naess, (1989) p. 45. Devall, (1980) p. 303. This is the subtitle of The Ecologist magazine since the summer of 1997. See the ‘Main Editorial’ of July/August 1997(b), vol. 27 (4), p. 130, by Edward Goldsmith. Leopold, (1949) p. 218. Kuehls, T. (1996) Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 28. Leopold, (1949) pp. 224–225. Naess, (1989) ch. 7, p. 169: The fifth tenet of Ecosophy T is that ‘[t]he uniqueness of humankind should not be underestimated’; Bookchin, (1995). Ferry, L. (Volk, C., trans.) (1995) The New Ecological Order, London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., is an example of this argument. Plumwood, (1993a) pp. 195–196 . Spretnak, C. (1986) ‘Beyond Humanism, Modernity and Patriarchalism’, in Gottlieb, R. S. (ed.) (1996) p. 533.

177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188

3

System building and ‘game openings’ Seeking an inclusive attitude for excluded ecological relations

If Foucault is to have an ‘influence’ it will no doubt be as a slayer of dragons, a breaker of systems. Such a task should not be seen as negative; indeed it is the system-building that is the real negation.1 What I say ought to be taken as ‘propositions’, ‘game openings’ where those who may be interested are invited to join in; they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc.2

Following the previous two chapters, which have outlined the need to adopt a less exclusive reading of International Relations (IR) and to adopt an ecological perspective, this chapter aims to demonstrate how an approach adopted from the writings of French philosopher, Michel Foucault, allows for conceptual and theoretical consideration of Ecological Relations. As demonstrated previously, IR has been constructed to logically dismiss the ecological dimension to politics. Indeed, the discipline of IR maintains an imperialist attitude towards all relations upon earth determining both knowledge and behaviour; and an environmental, rather than an ecological, response is the only easily accommodated response for it suppresses the ecological import. Thus, the discipline’s reactionary and transcendental attitude to politics over the lived realities of here and now incites radical revisioning. Specifically, four points lead me to believe that an approach adopted from Foucault’s literature will prise open IR’s ranks to ecological relations: 1, the open attitude to political praxis; 2, the holistic interpretation of societal power; 3, the playful attitude regarding discursive terms; and 4, the conceptual freedom to consider subjects beyond anthropocentric, androcentric and Western norms. The first reason for choosing to construct a metalanguage from Michel Foucault’s ‘political philosophy’3 is based upon his displacement of the stranglehold of sovereignty, wherever it is found and however it is formalised. Foucault viewed politics, as practised and theorised, as limitations on lifeexperiences; a constraining effect that bore little relation to the possibilities of life.4 In his private and academic life he strove to push beyond the boundaries of these binding conceptual and epistemological parameters, which were

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System building and ‘game openings’ for ecological relations

both self-imposed and structurally constructed.5 As such there appears to be a correspondence between a search for a theorisation of an ecological perspective that illuminates possibilities for inclusive relations and Foucault’s open attitude towards politicisation. Following on from this, Foucault’s work illuminates both the porous nature of boundaries and the pervasiveness of societal power to define and normalise these personally and structurally. In recognising constraints upon life, the subject – both personal and academic embodiments – struggles between helplessness to external forces and the assertion of autonomy to resist limitations that bears minimal, if any, relevance to one’s own location and interests. This holistic envisioning of the dense and infinite spread of societal power, within which relations are enmeshed, is conducive to an ecological perspective. As Chapter 2 has testified, fundamental to an ecologically informed politics is the interdependence of human society with the enveloping ecosystem and, that political praxis may be informed by a diversity of epistemologies arising from differing ontological and cultural contexts. Furthermore, Foucault’s discursive analysis allows me to ‘play’ with the term relations, which may be interpreted alternatively as the subjects of life and politics and as the linkage between subjects and/or events. The raison d’être of discursive analysis is the search for such theoretical ‘space’ within which conceptual ‘openings’ may be found that connects politics with life and where theory is thus conflated with practice. The approach adopted here questions Dreyfus and Rabinow’s categorisation of Foucault’s work as ‘the study of human beings and what one learns from such study’6 preferring instead the specification stated in The Order of Things by Foucault of a wish to look at ‘the knowledge of living beings’.7 In fact that publication arose from a reading of the taxonomy of animals, which in its bizarreness to the modern mind ‘demonstrated . . . the exotic charm of another system of thought . . . the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that’.8 From this he extrapolates that our culture defines, and is limited by, the ‘ordering of space’, that is epistemological and conceptual space, which disciplines what and how we think. Thus, the aim of his ‘inquiry’ was ‘to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible’.9 The following publication, Discipline and Punish, explicitly addresses the issue of means and ways of seeing (surveillance) as precursory to containing knowledge and, consequently, life possibilities.10 This work attempts to conceptually utilise that ‘space’: to allow in relations with organic bodies, rather than only social constructs, as a basis for revising theoretical possibilities. To this end, an exegesis is discovered in the continuity and consolidation of the themes of the subject and power relationships that evolve through the publications of Les Mots et les Choses in 1966, published four years later in English, as The Order of Things,11 via the ‘attempt to define this blank space’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge.12 This line of thought was further illuminated, despite the desire to ‘slip surreptitiously’ into the ‘slender gap’ of an already proceeding discourse initiated by his teacher, Jean Hyppolite, to


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question the Hegelian theme of the closure of philosophy to the mobility of the consciousness of the self, in Foucault’s inaugural lecture entitled ‘The Order of Discourse’ given in 1970.13 It was continued through the succeeding publications: Discipline and Punish,14 The History of Sexuality,15 The Use of Pleasure,16 and The Care of the Self,17 all of which were tentatively summed up in one of his final pieces of writing, ‘The Subject and Power’.18 This successive coherence is tentatively imposed upon Foucault’s writings in the recognition that his writings are as inimical, as they are adaptable, to such use.19 This perceived progression in Foucault’s works can also be viewed as analogous to the conceptual move from an epistemological structure that reflects the interests of the status quo, constructed by triangulating the three apexes of power, knowledge and right to its shadow image that is ontologically replete with ‘ourselves as subjects’. Contained within this conceptual move is the search for ‘space’ from which to analyse systems afresh, because ontological contingencies are allowed into view to problematise constrained subjects and constraining socio-political epistemologies constructed as ontological givens. This conflict is also reflected in Foucault’s writings. For example, the earlier discursive triangle is accorded self-importance where, although Foucault denies structuralism, the form is overly deterministic subsuming conceptual autonomy for subjective agency.20 Thus, in The Order of Things, Foucault finds that [i]t is no longer possible to think in our day than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.21 Indeed, the lack of a subject to compete for attention, simplifies the structural gaze. However, gradually, through the ‘attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity’22 the space unfolds as the discourse emerges, specifically in ‘The Order of Discourse’ to the volumes describing the struggle between the discourse and the subject – the ‘power relationship’23 over ‘the will to knowledge’. Ultimately, the ‘subject’ or ‘self’ is seen to form the core of inquiry, for although the triangular epistemological frame arranged around the apexes of knowledge (or truth), power and rights (or ethics) remains, its impact upon subjects and reactive role of these subjects is also revealed: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.24

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Foucault reveals the epistemological construction processes or genealogies wherein subjects are enmeshed (as losers regarding possession of autonomy). In this way, theoretical movement is regarded as entirely structural; theory does not allow for the ontological diversity and flux of life. However, with recognition of the inhabitation of theoretical life, theory is conflated with practice. Foucault demonstrates the unequal struggle for power between structurally legitimating forces and the subject. This power relationship is best illuminated via the experiences of those subjected to the ‘game’, if a distortion of the truth is to be averted. However, it is often these subjects whose voices go unheeded in the dominant discourse. So, cognisant of the limitations of Marxist conceptions of power, that is, the struggle between oppressor and the oppressed, and Freudian, psychological conceptions of the unconscious inherent in the consciousness, Foucault looked to Nietzschean genealogy to open up the discourse to analysis where the sanctimoniousness of sovereign identities and historical truths are teased out.25 Thus, as Sheridan has said, the ‘Foucauldian genealogy is an unmasking of power for the use of those who suffer it. It is also directed against those who would seize power in their name.’26 Quoting Gilles Deluze, Foucault thereby introduces, a theoretical revolution directed not only at bourgeois theories of the state, but at the Marxist conception of power and the relation to the state . . . Foucault is not content to say that certain notions have to be rethought, he does not even say it, he does it, and thus proposes new coordinates for practice . . . Another theory, another practice of struggle, another strategic organization are what emerge.27 This chapter aims to join this strategical pursuit in the attempt to politicise and theorise Ecological Relations. Thus a metalanguage is proposed where the constitutive subjects are women, nonhuman animals and indigenous peoples of lesser-developed regions of the world. That is not to say that the presently included subjects, that is, men, or historically contingent, political structures, for example, states and institutions are usurped; they equally could have been included in this theoretical re-reading. The aim here is to attempt to create room for more subjects – those that are normally excluded in IR, because they have been philosophically naturalised and are accepted epistemologically as ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘political’, subjects. At the very least it will illuminate areas of IR that have been sublimated through the realisation of the existence of ‘an unthinkable space’.28 Thus, to link back to the two quotations at the very outset of this chapter and forward to the next section, this chapter hopes to show how IR may be influenced by such ‘propositions’, thereby presenting another discourse or ‘unexpected unity’. Before this is possible, it is necessary to understand the processes and forces involved in the constitution of discourse.


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Missing the relations: understanding discourse from the exterior or archaeological perspective [I]t is usually the case that a discursive practice assembles a number of diverse disciplines or sciences or that it crosses a certain number among them and regroups many of their individual characteristics into a new and occasionally unexpected unity.29

In this section I intend to describe the constitution of a discourse that encapsulates analytical space within the apexes of power, knowledge and right. As this section will show, and the above quotation indicates, at this point Foucault believed in the foundational integrity, albeit contingent, of the power of social structures, termed archaeological discourse. Discourse constituted subjects; indeed, subjects per se were epistemologically inconsequential to sociopolitical analysis. In the foreword to The Order of Things, Foucault explained that he wished to study the history of thought of ‘irregular’ disciplines. Ecology, as testified in Chapter 2, would appear to fit Foucault’s identification of an ‘irregular’ discipline, that is considered by social science to be ‘too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery, to age-old traditions and external events’.30 The purpose of The Order of Things was to present the simultaneity of ‘the knowledge of living beings, the knowledge of the laws of language, and the knowledge of economic facts’ within the context of their emergence and specifically, the external formative rules, that is the ‘archaeological’ level.31 The opening of knowledge to that of ‘living beings’ – as opposed to the epistemological foundation of ‘language’, a human construct, and/or ‘economic facts’, social constructions – represents an opportunity to theorise from a ‘space’ inclusive of ecological determinants and naturalised subjects. Yet, it remains the structural determinants that are given conceptual priority. For, Foucault wished to explore the teleological ordering of ‘living beings’ based upon historical a priori that condensed them into singular and positivist rationality. He hypothesised that description of these ‘transformations’ would constitute ‘an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of scientific change and epistemological causality was to be constructed’. The nexus of this next analytical step was ‘the subject’ residing between ‘the epistemological level of knowledge and the archaeological level of knowledge’.32 The ambivalence of the term, ‘subject’ is retained, as subject to levels of knowledge but also subjects of knowledge with the capability to rise above subjection. This is the entry point for this hypothesis – that newly illuminated ecological relations may be included within IR praxis, fully cognisant of their contingent social context and ecological foundation, from a metaphysical foundation of ecology as ontology and an interdependent flux of epistemologies. However, this is to jump ahead. The purpose of archaeology, in searching for the ‘many correlative spaces’ was to ‘find what may be called its enveloping theory’ from the range of

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available discourses.33 Within this approach ‘words are as deliberately absent as things themselves’ for Foucault argued that it was important to ‘remain’ ‘at the level of discourse itself’ so simultaneously revealing the practice of discourse where regulation of rules and the ‘ordering of objects’ creates knowledge and form.34 It is the contention of this chapter that the essential vacuity of this space, that absence of living relations impacting upon the form of the discourse, led Foucault to focus his efforts increasingly upon the notion of the subject and the processes of subjectification that ensured it remained within the archaeological triangulating form of discourse. This ‘philosophical-philological space’ was opened up by recalling Nietzsche’s questioning for whom discourse played – from whose possession the language of words played. The problem that Foucault left himself with was that he had created criteria for ‘the individualization of discourses’ due to the unitary ‘linguistic system’, any one of which holds the potential to present a ‘totalizing history’ and so the space to describe ‘the episteme of a period’, that is, the arbitrarily contingent description of a certain moment. Yet, ‘the episteme is not a sort of grand underlying theory, it is a space of dispersion, it is an open and doubtless indefinitely describable field of relationships’. ‘The episteme is not a general developmental stage of reason, it is a complex relationship of successive displacements.’ Thus, this triangular form reveals a space, but it is a specific epistemological construct reflecting ‘not a slice of history’, but ‘a simultaneous play of specific remanences’;35 and what is chosen to represent this arbitrary epistemology in turn, limits that which can be expressed. What Foucault wished to show was ‘thus neither a formalization nor an exegesis, but an archaeology . . . the description of an archive’: a critical exploration of the defining set of rules in society at a given time. These are the ‘limits and forms of the sayable’, the choice of which to conserve, and which, on the other hand, disappear; linked to this what is deemed memorable and which ‘foreign’ and thus excluded through negligence; which are chosen to evolve and retain value rather then be abandoned; and, finally, which are appropriated, and by whom, even institutionalised.36 This deterministic, archaeological level, where epistemology sets into form, is based upon a certain pre-defined conception of rationality, as the following section will reveal.

Political rationality: power, knowledge, right – discourse Foucault excavated modern political thinking from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationality formulated around the concept of raison d’état. Such political rationality brought about specific governing techniques that shaped society according to the acknowledged interests of the state, constituted as a natural object. Political rationality at this historical juncture became distinct from other forms of rationality on the basis of its


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manifestation and expression through ‘normalising’ institutions. It also became distinct from political theories that dealt with the history of ideologies. In contrast, political rationality allowed for individual resistance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, ensured the sublimation and homogenisation of all within the totalising structure of the state.37 Philosophically, such rationalising originated from the Kantian imperative to restrain the rational and hence the concept of the political within the bounds of lived realities. Yet, on the other hand, philosophy was accredited with the role of political arbiter: ‘to keep watch over the excessive powers of political authority’38 as Chapter 1 illuminated. Paradoxically, an ecological perspective to political praxis could use this inherited political rationality by encouraging an individual consciousness of being-as-flux within a specific cultural and ecological context. However, simultaneously, the disciplining authority of a singular social power is critiqued. Thus, it may be seen that political rationality has been constructed according to a socio-cultural and historically contingent understanding of power. The significance of this unilinear concept within political rationality leads Foucault to devote considerable attention to it. Power Since ‘political power’ has come to be viewed as static, traditionally resulting in warfare to resolve conflict, Foucault adopts the philosopher’s original role to critically scrutinise political rationality and its constituent reifying tactics in order to reveal the plural manifestations of power ‘wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced’.39 Power is seen to inform the discourse and inform society. It is shown to be enforcing singularity and closed unitary values upon contingent, perhaps even arbitrary, epistemological constructions and so thereby leaving open the possibility of reconstruction. Foremost, power is viewed in two ways: first, as comparable to a tangible commodity with consequences, that may be termed positive or negative rights; and, second, as ‘the dominationrepression schema’ which focuses upon the net effects of ‘struggle and submission’. Foucault categorises his work within the second band, for the first conception of power, he believes, is dependent upon an economisation of the theory of power;40 whereby the results of any struggle over power are sublimated and reduced to the perspective of the victor, negating, and thus further discrediting, the identity of the vanquished and reasons for a contestation of values. On the contrary, power relations are ‘multiple’ and ‘interwoven’; yet, despite this, their dispersed interconnectedness coalesces around a general disposal of ‘domination’ and this is ‘partially’ amenable to ‘coherent and unitary’ reformulation for the purposes of overall strategic adaptation. Accordingly, ‘dispersed, heteromorphous, localised procedures of power are adapted, re-enforced and transformed by these global

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strategies and this being accompanied by numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement and resistance’ means that one needs to think beyond ‘a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with “dominators” on the one side and “dominated” on the other’. Power is not simply a repressive force, but it ‘traverses’ ‘the whole social body’ and ‘produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse’.41 The multifarious and manifold relations of power ‘permeate, characterise and constitute the social body’ to such an effect that they cannot be identified, nor thus utilised without ‘the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse’.42 So that, although power relations represent a point of ‘agonism’: a mutual struggle between the relations that is a process and never a finished combat,43 this combative relationship does not necessarily obliterate the distinguishing characteristics of each relation. Indeed they are mutually constitutive; power is a reciprocal process and power relations are inseparable from social relations. Accordingly, this means that they are also amenable to, and increasingly are ‘governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form, or under the auspices, of state institutions’.44 Foucault delimits a number of methodological precautions: first, that one should not be concerned with ‘the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations’, but rather, its manifestations ‘at its extremities’, in its ‘ultimate’ ‘capillary’ ‘destinations’, that is, its localised formations, overriding the hegemonic conception of right; second, power should not be analysed as deliberate intent, but rather, seen and studied at the point of articulation, namely its object; third, power is not to be viewed as a ‘consolidated and homogeneous’ phenomenon, resulting in the domination of one (individual or group) over another or others, but as a circulatory and functional exercise always in the process of symbiotic fluidity, not a property in and of itself; fourth, one should ‘conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been, and continue to be, invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination’.45 These starting points are as ‘economically advantageous and politically useful’ as powers presumed to be located at the apex of hierarchies, which have arrived there due to context-specific mechanisms, but have become translated as commanding hegemonic authority for society and have been strengthened by being invested with ideology46 – all notions of power accepted by (neo)Realist theory and IR theories in general. Instead, as a mechanism, power is seen to supersede any ideological constructions, for it produces ‘the effective instruments’ and sorts knowledge that precedes the formation of ideological constructs.47 Power remains the ultimate referent at stake when any genealogical rereading of a discourse is practised. It may be dispersed but is never in fact


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mediated by ‘the rules of right that provide a formal delimitation of power’ or, by ‘the effects of truth that this power produces and transmits, and which in their turn reproduce this power’.48 For, the ‘mechanisms of power’, in ‘capillary form’, extend into ‘the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’.49 This pervasive web of power is conceived as different from the rule of a sovereign from a position above and separate from the people. Sovereign power, that is, ‘Power’ is embodied in and possessed exclusively by a socially elevated individual, for example, a monarch, or in laws. Thence arises a societal dichotomisation of power: ‘Power’ and power; this is the difference between the sovereign and the local. The individual, as a product and producer of power mechanisms, maintains power relations that in turn bolster the ‘higher’ level of, for example, the state.50 Yet it is the control of the power embodied in the lives, thoughts and activities of subjects that is crucial: whose interests are served determines the status of the subject; is an individual free to conceptualise, express and practise their inherent power to pursue life appropriate to their circumstances, or are they made to feel as an object to an exterior, sovereign Power? Foucault summarises thus: Power’s condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more ‘peripheral’ effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engenders states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And ‘Power,’ insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement . . . power . . . is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.51 That power is susceptible to adaptation for strategic interests52 and pervasive does not detract from its archaeological dominance in the construction process of a discourse; power is an exterior force at the apex of a triangulating structure ordering society. Knowledge is an interacting force in this archaeological form.

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Knowledge The relationship between knowledge and power is perceived by Foucault as a process between two symbiotically integrated concepts.53 Accordingly, the essence of knowledge, or truth, can only be captured as a movement that effects power; and knowledge is constituted by both forms and relations of power. Knowledge is framed by power, which is not to say that it holds no power in and of itself, but that it is ‘produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power’. ‘Each society has its régime of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’. It is thus that the notion of truth is co-opted and abbreviated for the unproblematised functioning of society. The ‘political economy’ of knowledge is defined according to five characteristics: it is produced and espoused via scientific or institutionalised discourse; it constantly adapts itself to political and economic incentives; in its varied and many manifestations, it is consumed as is any other object; it is the outcome of a few ‘apparatuses’; and, finally, it is a subject of political discussion and social friction.54 Thus, the constitution of knowledge by power, and the reification of power by knowledge, effectively circumscribes what may be known to advance specific societal interests. In return society demands that we ‘produce the truth of power’ to enable unproblematised functioning. To find the singular truth, we are thus confined to a unitary and unquestioned acceptance of power. The conquest of truth is seen to be the only significant and ultimate pursuit of society; it is perceived as necessarily arriving at the one conception of right. However, right, too, can be viewed pluralistically and mediates power and knowledge. For example, Discipline and Punish explored the social construction of newly understood delinquent forms of behaviour that lend themselves to technological doctoring and are thence depoliticised. It records the strategies that produced (human) bodies and concomitantly, bodies of normalised social practices. The disciplinary power of this nexus of power-knowledge is insidious: ‘discreet’ and ‘invisible’; ‘a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge’ where ‘power produces . . . reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’.55 Power is thus seen to be naturalised, legitimised and emboldened to the extent that ‘the carceral texture of society’ becomes pervasive and unquestioningly accepted as right.56 This epistemology is merely one specific ‘discursive apparatus’ among silenced possibilities where ‘the said as much as the unsaid’ constitutes ‘the system of relations’ or societal ‘apparatus’.57 The disciplining mechanisms of power over life are two-fold: focused upon ‘the body as a machine’ and ‘the species body’.58 These ‘techniques of power [are] present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions’.59 Governmentalised institutions arose to normalise behaviour and regiment order. Foucault labelled this phenomenon ‘bio-power’. It amounted to a restrictive representation of life and life forms, often positing the human


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and privileged male as the universalisable norm. Even though the variety of life ‘constantly escapes’ such disciplining techniques,60 subjugated and ‘deviant’ practices and peoples were epistemologically disrespected. This was illustrated in Foucault’s first publication, The Birth of the Clinic, where the poor – socially disrespected, since naturalised as beneath the norm of political subjectivity – could only receive medical treatment if they agreed to be an object of medical science.61 It is through the reduction of ways of perceiving, that are inseparable from forms of knowledge, that is, of knowing what is true, by power, and vice versa, the delimitation of power by knowledge, that the struggle, or play, for right emerges. The Introduction to the first volume of The History of Sexuality focuses upon this theme with a questioning of society’s ‘Victorian repression’ with regard to the discourse of sexuality. This was a discourse governed by ‘rules of propriety’ by means of ‘a policing of statements’. Indeed, it ‘almost certainly constituted a whole restrictive economy’, effectively reducing freedom of speech (and thought) and disciplining social relations and spaces in much the same way as the carceral techniques of the prison system described in Discipline and Punish.62 Thus, to recapitulate, ‘power produces knowledge’ and there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These ‘power-knowledge relations’ are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations.63 In returning to the ‘traditional question of political philosophy’, that is, how a discourse presented as the truth or the singular knowledge on which a theory is based delimiting the parameters of power, is cast aside, the archaeological structure needs to appeal to its third determining apex of right. So Foucault also asks, ‘what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?’64 Right Power and knowledge, in turn, combine to impact upon the area of right so that normalisation is not only effected but also, more regularly, institutionalised. This in turn leads to, or alternately, provides an explanation for, ‘the global functioning’ of ‘a society of normalisation’. However, ‘disciplinary normalisations’ also inevitably conflict with established notions of sovereignty upon which the juridical systems of secular society rest. Thus, an

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arbitrating discourse is needed to buffer and neutralise the fractious nexus between power and knowledge. Often this takes the form of a scientific rationale. For example, the discourse of medicine allowed a ‘general medicalisation’ to intersect the notions of discipline and sovereignty; a purported transcendence in the name of science explained ‘behaviours, conducts, discourses, desires, etc.’, without unsettling the twin conceptual poles of the sovereign (for example, the individual or an authority) and the discipline (for example, societal normalisation).65 So right is legitimated according to the dictates of power-knowledge. Simultaneously, power is reified. In order to liberate the principle of right, space for resistance is required: to be anti-disciplinary and freed from the canon of sovereignty. Political philosophy erected around the principle of sovereignty (of the state or the individual, etc.) delimits its endeavours and potential for political praxis, for it recognises only one parameter of power relations.66 The interaction of knowledge, power and right economises what may be known, circumscribing also theoretical perspectives, which, according to such a tightly-drawn metaphysical frame, can only regard dichotomous relationships. This is the philosophical legacy bequeathed to the social sciences and to orthodox IR, which has generally accepted as foundational the naturalisation of sovereign subjects outside the parameters of power, knowledge and right. Foucault struggles with this conclusion, that is, the triangulating of conceptual space for political praxis by the power relationship between power, knowledge and right, which in turn constitute discourse as discussed in the following section. Discourse [I]t is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.67

Discourse presented as unified logos may be cognitively independent, yet is contingently embodied. Its conditions of construction, however distant, chronologically, conceptually, etc., remain normatively instructive and thus it is important to recognise these practices of construction: the ‘group of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity’.68 Consequently, discourse impacts upon power relations. Interestingly, this may not necessarily further the drive of power; it is the discourse that ultimately holds power, according to an archaeological level of analysis. ‘Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’.69


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It is here at the level of discourse that power may be grasped differently. ‘The Order of Discourse’ is accredited with the pivotal role in Foucault’s shift in thinking from an analysis of discursive functions as entangled with power relations to the rootlessness of discourse with the ability to reify, but also subvert, the production of power.70 The ‘hypothesis’ proposed in this lecture is that ‘in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous formidable materiality’.71 He postulates three ‘types of prohibition’ which mutually support each other: social power struggles that lead to exclusionary practices; disciplinary divisions and subsequent social outcasting; and the ‘opposition between true and false’ as a result of a ‘will to truth’. In sum, a ‘prodigious machinery designed to exclude’. However, these are only the external ‘procedures for controlling and delimiting discourse’. There are also ‘internal procedures’ of ‘rarefaction’, that is, processes reducing and purifying the permissible composition of a discourse. These may be manifested in the form of texts that confirm and reify social norms, coherence attributed to an author, and/or adherence to the ‘discipline’, which is defined, in turn, according to specific parameters. The third force controlling discourses is mediated through the control of the ‘subjects’ and, in particular, their accessibility to the discourse, that is, the degree of openness and/or restriction dependent upon the social status of the subject approaching the discourse.72 Thus power is embodied and imposed internally as well as superimposed by external structures. At the core is the individual subject, the fictitious atom of an ideological representation of society; but he [sic] is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’ . . . power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.73 Through an archaeological perspective it is rules, rather than human consciousness, that are found to govern life. Discourse blurs this realisation by promoting the produced subject and produced knowledge as purely ontological variables rather than as representations of epistemological mediation. Modern political rationality is thus proffered as ‘an ontology without metaphysics’.74 Rediscovering the subject thus reconnects theory to life, epistemology to ontology and the subject to power. This is crucial for an ecological reading of politicised relations, whereby metaphysics and practice need to correspond to ecocultural and temporal contingencies. As the next section reveals the subject is the axis of life and theory.

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The production of the subject The subject is on the one hand prior to the discourse, indeed has a ‘primordial complicity with the world’, and thus is ‘given the task of directly animating the empty forms of language with his [sic] aims’, only to find that ‘in the end the whole rationality of the world’ (itself another discourse) determines ‘one’s speculation’. So the ‘idea of the founding subject’ is here ‘elided’ with a constructed ‘reality of discourse’. Thus Foucault wished to focus his work on questioning ‘our will to truth’, on recalling that discourse is ‘an event’ and on deflating ‘the sovereignty of the signifier’.75 However, in order to pursue these hypotheses the notion of the subject needed expansion. From the depiction of strategies of the manipulation of knowledge, truth and power in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault moved on in the second volume, The Use of Pleasure, to describe how individual conduct is governed by the social body via techniques of self-governance. Such a prescribed notion of, and focus upon one’s relation to, self is conceptualised as ‘ethics’. This theme of the ethics of the subject is the axis of Volume 3, The Care of the Self. A development of ethics is the ‘cultivation of the self ’ incorporating individualism, a premium placed upon one’s private life and an intense relationship with one’s own spiritual conduct and redemption. This is a constructive and constant exercise which ‘makes the question of truth – the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing – central to the formation of the ethical subject’.76 So ethos becomes a foundation of the subject and of the process of politicisation. This contrasts with the classical heritage of the dominant theoretical perspective in IR, whereby ethics are distinct from and beyond political consideration.77 Thus, the subject embodies power relations and is structurally contained; yet, the subject is also able to resist the hold of power and assert individual autonomy, despite the struggle to break free. Indeed the struggle for emancipation, it is implied, is required ethically of humanity, as fully conscious subjects; submission to power ensures objectification and suppression of the total capabilities of the living agent. In the end, it is the ‘self’ that is the issue at the heart of Foucault’s research. Power relations emanate from and gravitate towards this core: the subject. Thus, the importance of power is its manifestation in the form of techniques upon the subject/object, thereby constituting the latter’s identity; an identity that is imposed and self-expressed. This leads Foucault not only to question who we, as human relations, are, but also, not to submit ourselves willingly, even ‘to refuse what we are’. The ‘double bind’ of human subjection, imposed by oneself and by others beyond our self, that is, ‘the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures’, however, does not foreclose the ability ‘to imagine and to build up what we could be’.78 The human subject may be at the centre of political debate drawing upon Kantian philosophical rationality, yet this political discourse is ‘watched’. This accords with the substitution of Christianity, as the structural provider


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of ‘pastoral power’, by the state and the associated emphasis upon individualisation of political power, but simultaneously, also introduces a totalising of all powers within the one overwhelming political structure; the issue now at hand is the freedom of subjectivity from this second ‘double bind’.79 The human being, as the ‘produced’ subject, is located precariously and only recently at the apex of the ordering of knowledge, despite ‘his’ appearance of eternity within discourse. So the human being, conceptually, is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago: but man has grown old so quickly that it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thousands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which he would finally be known.80 This ‘epistemological field’ included the concept of humanism and came about merely as ‘an event in the order of knowledge’. It was then reproduced in a general distribution of the episteme creating a paradoxical situation, for immediately the human being became that basis upon which all knowledge could be non-problematically constituted: an a fortiori object. Subsequently, scientific disciplines became problematic for they had been posited as prior to human sciences yet humanist epistemology was rationalised according to positivist science.81 As such, Foucault questions discourse, refuting as laughable the notion that there exists a pivotal, sovereign and ‘primordial’ individual (agent or discipline) from which all conceptualisation arises, as modernity persists in reifying: To all those who wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all those warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.82 Instead, if theorisation starts from a point that refuses to accept that ‘man’ is the sole conceptual apex, then a new metaphysics is required. For the ‘quest for a sovereign unique and constraining form’83 that arises from the discourse of state politics is perceived by Foucault to be ethically and philosophically oppressive. As such he proceeds contrary to the usual rules of engagement for political and historical analysis. His preference for revealing the events that have persisted through previously considered political and/or historical voids

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is not a matter of filling in, theoretically, but of illuminating the mechanisms that created this historical picture and simultaneously the forces that worked to counter it. This is attempted without reference to ‘the consciousness, obscure or explicit, of speaking subjects; without referring the facts of discourse to the will – perhaps involuntary of their authors’.84 For to do so would be to allow oneself to be disciplined by past normalising procedures, falling into the trap of persisting in the production of the sovereign subject. Since discourse is theoretically and conceptually incarcerated, Foucault strives ‘to operate a decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre’.85 Archaeologically discourse resists ontology, yet recreates and reproduces a sovereign life or concept: the human subject as the ontological base precariously settled upon a metaphysical void. This central character is empiricised as the source of all positive conceptions and the basis of ‘an anthropological prejudice’ accredited legitimating status. Philosophically, ‘all efforts to think afresh’ are hindered by this cognitive and conceptual presentation.86 To escape this confinement of thought and politicisation, Foucault pinpoints the need to scrutinise the continuing process of construction of discourses, which hold both knowledge and subjects: Discursive practices are characterised by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories. Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices.87 This is the definition of a discipline to which IR adheres and which, by definition, must exclude those subjects beyond the boundaries of normalised politicisation.88 Because the foundational metaphysics are given as ‘Classical’, insisting upon a separation of ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’, even when the sovereign discourse of language attempts to mediate these two epistemologies, integral subject status is not necessarily achieved for the discourse of language easily perpetuates the foundational metaphysics. For example, the human being is ‘required’ as the speaking animal who can articulate the satisfaction of needs, to reign in a ‘circle’ of ‘production’;89 a ‘mode of being’ which possesses the cogito who also participates in the irrational animal world: the realm of ‘non-thought’.90 So discourse provides the legitimating epistemological support for human sovereignty purported to be ontology. The result is that the individual subject finds him/herself in that ‘ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator’, a condensation of ‘the entire space of the representation . . . to one corporeal gaze’.91 So Foucault finds the pivotal subject to be contingently manipulable: ‘an invention of recent date’ or ‘perhaps nearing its end’? The human subject may represent the inherent freedoms that differentiate humanity from animality,


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yet is as susceptible to being wiped from primary display in textual representations of life as easily as a drawing in the sand. Such awareness forces us to recognise the fragility of epistemological presentations of life and the need to be open to reconceptualising political alternatives.92 Thus ‘the modern episteme’ is informed not by empirical knowledge of the human subject but by a human science that is constructed according to the play of power, knowledge and right. This conceptual ‘volume of space’ within discourse is ‘at once perilous and in peril’ because of its derivative, indeterminate and contingent nature. Accordingly, ‘human sciences’ can only present analysis of the human as object, duplicating the object as the subject and so presenting an epistemological construction as ontological embodiment.93 So the emancipation of humanism from this space representing ‘perhaps the summit and culmination of life’ is still blocked by the ‘human sciences’ – ‘dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge’.94 This inextricable link between epistemological and ontological modes is revealed through ‘empiricotranscendental reduplication’; ‘what is given in experience and what renders experience possible correspond to one another in an endless oscillation’.95 The subject represents and embodies this situation, but, significantly, is never a free subject: always texted as object. To elude this bind of reductive assimilation to object, the task is to make differences: to constitute them as objects, to analyse them, and to define their concept. Instead of travelling over the field of discourses in order to recreate the suspended totalizations for its own use, instead of seeking in what has been said in that other hidden discourse, which nevertheless remains the same, it is continually making differentiations, it is a diagnosis.96 Analysis of the archaeology of discourses is only one step towards reconstruction and political emancipation. The significant fact is that it is the human subject who holds the power to analyse human science revealing the ‘norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of its forms and contents’.97 Ultimately, it is the subject who not only resides within the grip of power but who can consciously manifest power to effect politicisation.

Finding the relations: genealogical exegesis and the hold on the subject Whereas the previous discussion centred upon the sublimation of the subject as autonomous relation, we now arrive at a point where the openness and movement of the term relation may be found within a revised, interdependently autonomous subject. Thus, Foucault discarded the hold of notions attached to historical analysis, namely, the presupposition of ‘consciousness and continuity’ and assignation of structure, in favour of the linkage, whether

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regular or inconsistent and all associated play between ‘the event and the series’ found embodied in the subject.98 This form of analytical work he divides into ‘critical’ and ‘genealogical’, although they are recognised as fundamentally inseparable. The critical work, described previously, addresses the forms of exclusion and genealogy the formation of the outcomes of these processes. Foucault recognised the emergence of ‘the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories’99 and, consequently, the need to promote ‘the local character of criticism’, which is indicative of ‘an autonomous, non-centralised kind of theoretical production, one that is to say whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established régimes of thought’.100 This is significant for an ecological critique of IR, indeed for any attempt to theoretically revise the discipline. But, an ecological paradigm, specifically, theoretically searches out for the local and is dismissive of the imposition of sweeping norms, recognising that the diversity of life upon this earth cannot sustain, nor be sustained by ‘established régimes of thought’. Yet, since an ecological perspective requires a distinct ontology, universal categories, such as women, nonhumans and indigenous peoples do exist. This, however, does not entail universal epistemologies. Whether knowledges are sublimated or disqualified, both are the negative outcomes for a discourse of the positive effects of power. But if the theoretical gaze is captured by the hold of the power of the subject, the conceptual impetus for political praxis is demonstrated. This may be seen through a genealogical lens. Genealogy pierces the transparency of power by analysing the nexus between the hegemonised unity and local contingencies, alternatively represented as the privileged and derided forms of knowledge. The acceptance of both ‘an erudite knowledge and a popular knowledge’ and the genealogical revelation of the resulting struggle is possible when ‘the tyranny of globalising discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-garde’ is opened up discursively.101 This theoretical process holds the potential for an understanding that may be applied tactically. There is no exact telos, for the outcome is always necessarily arbitrary and subjective, dependent upon the selection of ‘insurrected knowledges’ illuminated against the anaesthetising body of ‘grand’ theory. By demonstrating this process of the inherent clash of knowledges, Foucault introduces ‘the local character of criticism’, bringing about ‘a return of knowledge’, for it pushes to the fore ‘subjugated knowledges’,102 thereby allowing the presentation of a more expansive reflection of the realities lived by peoples; a set of realities almost totally ignored by orthodox IR theory. Thus, ‘subjugated knowledges’ refers to ‘historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation’ and, second, ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’.103 This ‘popular knowledge’ differs from common knowledge; rather, it is particular to a


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region and thus is resistant to universalising tendencies. Its local characteristic is attributable both to inward and outward forces: to its consolidation of regional-specific knowledge sources and its pro-active recoiling from the bitterness of opposition from positions of incomprehension because actually and cognitively alien. Suppressed within both of these two forms of ‘subjugated knowledges’ are the memories of struggles and subsequent defeats, which are exegised through a pluralistic variety of genealogical research where ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’104 according to the pattern of the power of the subject. This ‘eventalization’ – the ‘making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant’ and the ‘rediscovering [of] the connections’ as well as the ‘blockages’ which exist within any established thought, counted as ‘self-evident, universal and necessary’ – permits the illumination of the plurality of discourses around any arbitrarily chosen nucleus. Thus Foucault, on one occasion, talks of ‘a “polygon” or rather a “polyhedron” of intelligibility, the number of whose faces is not given in advance and can never properly be taken as finite’, where ‘[o]ne has to proceed by progressive, necessarily incomplete saturation’.105 For the ‘objectification’ of history that has determined ‘the discourse of true and false’ is a dense, circular and multiplicitous web. The assignment of subject or object status and the effects of the discursive processes are all one and the same depending upon the epistemological hegemony of knowledge which, on the one hand, retains a linkage with its ‘empirical roots’, but also, on the other hand, has the impetus to become autonomous, requiring an ‘experimentation of ourselves, call[ing] us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge’.106 This debate is a development of Kant’s inquiry of Enlightenment: What are we as Enlightened subjects? This, itself, was a step removed from the Cartesian question of existence, to which the reply was the universal human I, on the evidence of cognition.107 Enlightened subjects are ethically conscious agents aware of their subjection to discourse and integral beings of contingent epistemological and ontological environments who recognise that ‘veneration’ of past truths is ‘parody’.108 It could be argued that Foucault persists in considering the human being as the sovereign political being on the basis that the defining element of a human is language, which, in turn, has been a deliberate component of political configurations of epistemology and ‘space’.109 Yet he is wary of this accusation for this presumption once again ‘presents a certain form of ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom’.110 Foucault’s aim was to uncover ‘the genealogy of problems, of problématiques’. In a ‘dangerous’ world,111 where ‘discourses are unities of functions’,112 language and its property of categorisation, synonymous with subjectivisation, entails ‘a hyper- and pessimistic activism’.113 His mistrust of accepted realities, including any conception of fundamental ‘human nature’, enforces a rejection of a positivistic belief of life, and assertion that ‘human

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nature’, as all other political configurations, is ‘an epistemological indicator of which the classifying, delimiting and other functions had an effect on scientific discussions, and not on what they were talking about’.114 The prerequisite of humanity, ethically and philosophically, is to scrutinise epistemological givens and thereby avoid unthinkingly recreating past biases. The subject (collectively or individually) has this capacity to effect both political thought and deed and thus is the ultimate power referent. Conversely, it is the relative hold of power over the subject that determines the power, or powerlessness, of the subject.115 From an acceptance of the diverse array of ambiguity inherent in subject status, Foucault recognised that his intention had not been merely to analyse ‘the phenomena of power’ but the ‘three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects’.116 These three steps of political analysis and the final maxim, that the subject holds conceptual power, described below, constitute a practical theoretical framework through which an ecological re-reading of IR may be conducted, providing hope for an inclusive politics upon earth. Within Foucauldian analysis, not only is theory meshed with practice, but also ethics are fundamental to political praxis; these basics are recognised to be embodied – individually and socially – within the subject.

Ethos as prelude to political praxis An ecological perspective requires an ethos of self-consciousness and cosmic awareness of interdependence and locality, which inherently problematises normalised and static political parameters. Such a metaphysical foundation to political praxis eludes any methodological search for a singular logic. Foucault’s antipathy to theorisation is relevant here; his ‘practice’ or ‘ethos’ requires the critic to engage with a ‘demanding, prudent, “experimental” attitude’.117 The term ‘attitude’ is adopted to question ‘the development of a domain of acts, practices, and thoughts . . . to pose problems for politics’.118 Thus an adoption of Foucauldian political practice necessarily implies an ethical disposition and active involvement; theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional . . . and not totalizing. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to ‘awaken consciousness’ that we struggle, but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance.119 Thus, to evade the academic separation of theory from life experiences and in order to see once again that theory does impact upon reality, the term theory is dispensed with, regarded as emptied of meaning. Indeed, Foucault accepts Deluze’s description of theory as ‘a box of tools’, ‘an instrument for


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multiplication’ that also multiplies itself.120 Instead, he writes from a conviction that political critique is still largely under-developed and therefore open to re-invention. This entails a cognitive and epistemological relaxation of the possible forms of ‘politicisation’. Indeed, by recognising that history has always been ‘fictioned’ ‘on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one “fictions” a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth’.121 Thus, re-mything politics is a continuation of the paradigmatic ‘game’ and, in allowing for theoretical and epistemological movement, creates the possibility of breaking free from inert conceptual and methodological categories that hold minimal ontological relevance and political potency. In his own life, Foucault shifted from believing that a radical, political intellectual was ‘a kind of elusive guerrilla warrior . . . [s]niping from the margins’ ‘incessantly on the move’ ‘with no clear focal point’122 to the contentment with his role as a philosopher, in the mould of Diogenes, the Cynic, who defiantly and publicly practised as well as philosophised the ‘limitexperiences’ of his life (and death). Thus, he embodied a conversion of the self that he theorised – ‘a kind of turning round on the spot’ to see once again the world.123 This was a switching from a controversial and antagonistic attitude to one that actively searched for common ground and the possibilities of respectful discussion. Following the demand of Nietzsche to transcend the self inherited and imprinted by history – specifically to respond to the question of the inherent Other within us all and in doing so confront the question of ‘How did I become what I am and why do I suffer from what I am?’124 – he searched within himself as well as within socio-cultural conditions. Thus Foucault’s return to Kantian philosophy was an expansive questioning of reason, its dangers and constraints. As such, history, the ‘place of tranquillized sleep’125 was the greatest fear.126 In classical times, the zenith of power was the ‘right of death’127 over living subjects; in Foucauldian times, it is the death of the sovereign, unitary author ‘as the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas’ that holds attention. Questions of the discourse regarding space and representation are of central significance.128 Indeed, Foucault frequently refused to play the role of the ideologue; he often preferred to remain anonymous in order to liberate the reader from society’s determination to give power to the intellectual; recognising that naming is a force that shapes pre-conceptions.129 One of his more powerful quotes, when he replied to an imagined criticism that he was not sure of his position, is: ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to the bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their mortality when we write’.130 Foucault remained antithetical to all attempts to fix pluralistic identities with the appearance of sameness and, similarly, resisted the notion of a unitary telos to conclude theoretical/political analyses on the basis that predictable conclusions are contrary to any strategic attempt to be free.131 Indeed, the incentive is to seek the unknown: ‘The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end’.132

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The Foucauldian analysis exegised here reveals that truth is contingent and insistent upon the inclusion of pluralistic alternatives. A theory that allows for analysis of the determinants of local contingencies and non-static ontological beings whilst destabilising normalised political concepts shows that surface inconsistencies are not an obstacle but mirror the plurality of visions of international politics. The axiomatic theme is the struggle against epistemological barriers to seek out conceptual space that correlates with ontological experiences: It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.133 Thus Foucault seeks to metaphysically and practically repair the modern rupture that divorces epistemology from ontology in the social body and individual agent. At first, Foucault saw the ‘problem’ as ‘not changing people’s consciousness – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional régime of the production of truth’.134 Later, where the emphasis had shifted to the ethos of the personal practices of politics, his purpose came to be to also ‘change something in the minds of people’.135 A necessary prelude was the ‘immediate and urgent’ task to ‘indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it’.136 Foucault ‘absolutely’ refuses to prescribe political agendas, but confronts and scrupulously questions issues.137 But, on the other hand, he has said that politics is no more and no less than the potential for revolution138 and hopes that the ‘truth’ of his work holds relevance ‘in the future’.139 He prefers to hypothesise rather than theorise: to provide openings for discussion, rather than provide an alternative ‘truth’, thereby freeing ‘us from the crushing power of a certain régime of truth’.140 Foucault’s contribution to politics has been termed ‘a gentle revolution’.141 It is certainly a positive perspective; as Foucault has said, ‘so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constants’.142 Thus, ‘experimental’ conceptual openings are here proposed for the discipline of IR without seeking to present another totalising orthodoxy. Within this reformulation, theorisation becomes ‘strategic knowledge’.143 Since Foucault’s genealogical attitude celebrates the holistic multiplicity of ecological relations, an innovative approach is required that simultaneously encompasses an attitude of ethical praxis.


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A methodology for an ecological perspective of IR Here I would like to quote at length from Foucault in order to outline the four steps of this metatheoretical template: The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire générale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labours, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.144 Second, Foucault ‘studied the objectivizing of the subject in . . . “dividing practices”. The subject is either divided inside him[/her]self or from others. This process objectivizes him[/her]. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “good boys”.’145 This leads to the third mode of inquiry, that is, the study of ‘the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject. For example, . . . how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of “sexuality” ’.146 Thus subjection is self-imposed, and internalised as normal. The culmination of this progression brings Foucault to conclude, ‘it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research’.147 In effect, this amounts to a fourth and final mode of inquiry, despite the fact that Foucault adds this observation as an afterthought, admitting that he is becoming ‘quite involved with the question of power’ and realising that these ‘power relations are very complex’.148 Ultimately, the subject remains fundamental to an analysis of power relations, acting as ‘a constant checking’ to the theoretical a prioris presumed in a study of power; the subject, by adopting an ethical attitude acts as a philosophical check upon the illegitimate usurpation of power.149 These four maxims are taken as ordering guidelines for the organisation of my case-study material in this ecological interpretation of IR. It amounts to a genealogical analysis of ecological relations. The first methodological step is the objectification of the focus of study, as seen in the differing areas of the subject’s life, language and labour, where the subject/relation is subsumed beneath the discourse. Despite strong denials of structuralism, the archaeological form promotes epistemology over ontology. There is the creation of ‘space’ to analyse phenomena, for example, power. However, the discourse denies the validity of the subject; the subject has been naturalised as unworthy of political agency. Similarly, the second step, in revealing the ‘dividing practices’ that make this objectifying gaze possible overlooks the subjects as constitutive agents. Regarding this process ethically checked, Foucault finds that genealogical illumination of the subject allows for theoretical interaction with these objectivising processes. Thus, the third step allows for self-transformation from

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object to subject status; the formerly naturalised and depoliticised subjects forcefully demand and attain the opportunity to be integral actors with regard to questions of self-governance. However, their inherent strength, alongside the possibility of transmutation of values and bodies, ultimately reveals power to be pervasive and inimical to containment, but always embodied, individually and collectively, and adaptable. Thus, the subjects find that subjection is a constant struggle but that the challenge of living at peace requires it of us. Thus the archaeological trihedron becomes the shadow to the genealogical trihedron, where the critical spotlight is upon the subject, still a composite of the power-knowledge-rights nexus but also informing the discourse. And the space for ‘strategic’ play/praxis is in our liberation from constraining discourses that have become institutionalised and which have objectified us in the process. Interestingly, towards the end of his life Foucault began to assert himself, whereas before he had tended only to suggest tentative hypotheses for consideration. He now called for the promotion of ‘new forms of subjectivity’ that rejected impositions upon us as if we were objects.150 Throughout his own life, Foucault pushed to the fore the subliminal or consciously buried ethical meanings of political constructions urging us to ‘not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher . . .We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them’.151 And these ‘things’ include ourselves, and our relations. For the ascription of political identities require scrutiny amidst the search for the subject. The issue and importance of Foucault’s contribution, is the attempt to uncover the political purposes behind the presentation of ‘facts’ and rationalised observations. In doing so the locus and motivations of power may be revealed. A way of doing this is suggested: ‘It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point . . . so as to bring to light power relations . . . through the antagonism of strategies’.152 For ‘the problem of the power relation’ will persist.153 The selected ‘subjects’ of this thesis are all examples of disciplined and buried ‘objects’, requiring an ‘ascending’ analysis to reveal, in genealogical fashion, the multiplicity of contingent ontological embodiments within the ongoing triangulating, epistemological nexus of power-knowledge-rights. Such a methodology permits an exegesis of relations and relationships that contributes towards the construction of disciplines, régimes of thought and subjects that have formerly excluded them but, could, also, include them. Recognition of the interdependence of all relations incites resistance to dichotomised views; the ‘dominated’ and the ‘dominating’ do not reside in two polar extremes, but are co-existent. The web of life is not so simplistically reduced.


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Conclusion To conclude, the four steps of the proposed methodology which open up theorisation for an ecological revisioning of IR are: 1 2

3

4

the objectification of women, nonhumans and indigenous peoples as normalised through everyday life, language and labour practices; the ‘dividing practices’ that constantly reify the naturalisation of the experiences, meanings and bodies of these subjects, ensuring their exclusion from politicisation as social subjects with inherent value; the resistance of these objectified beings against such subjugating practices and their oppressors, and the attempts to reverse the normalised dynamics of the status quo; and the power struggles that ensue which illuminate the coherence, integrity and potential tenacity of subjects to realise their full potential within their ecological and cultural place.

The subsequent three ‘case-study’ chapters follow this framework. Thus, each case is reviewed and is seen to reveal an exegesis of the possibility of a new theoretical space with inherent political implications centred on the emergence of these ‘rediscovered’ subjects of IR. The possibility for emancipatory praxis is foregrounded within awareness of power relations and of a congruence of ontology and epistemology that emanates from the ecological context of the subject. The dynamic of the discourse retains the omnipotent hold of power relations, yet the subject rises as autonomous agent; the experiences of the subject are shown to constitute meaning and foster awareness of one’s location in the grid of structural power relations and their specific cultural and ecological homelands. The ensuing struggle to break free from patriarchal, anthropocentric or Eurocentric strategies for domination resulting in binary constructions and structures of social oppression are illuminated; the ‘space’ between the orthodox theoretical dualism is opened up to reveal the plural and diverse ontological, epistemological and ethical grounds for politicisation by and for the holistic totality of subjects upon this earth. It is hoped that this may provide heuristic potential for practical emancipation.

Notes 1 Sheridan, A. (1980) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, London and New York: Tavistock Publications Ltd., p. 225. 2 Foucault, M. (1991c) ‘Questions of Method, Why the Prison?’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p. 74. 3 Cf. Foucault, M. (1980g) ‘Truth and Power’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press.

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4 Foucault, M. (1991b) ‘Politics and the Study of Discourse’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 5 Miller, J. (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault, London: HarperCollins. 6 Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, With an Afterword by Michel Foucault, Brighton: The Harvester Press, p. xiii. 7 Foucault, M. (1970a) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses) London: Tavistock Publications Ltd. (no named translator), p. ix. 8 Foucault, (1970a) p. xv. 9 Foucault, (1970a) p. xxi. 10 Foucault, M. (Sheridan, A., trans.) (1977a) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir) London: Penguin. Also Foucault, M. (Hurley, R., trans.) (1979) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (Histoire de la Sexualité) London: Allen Lane Penguin. 11 Foucault, (1970a). 12 Foucault, M. (Sheridan Smith, A. M., trans.) (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’Archéologie du Savoir) London: Routledge, p. 17. 13 Foucault, M. (1970b) ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Young R. (ed.) (1981) Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge. 14 Foucault, (1977a). 15 Foucault, (1979). 16 Foucault, M. (Hurley, R., trans.) (1992) The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, (L’Usage des Plaisirs) London: Penguin. 17 Foucault, M. (Hurley, R., trans.) (1988a) The Care of the Self, Volume 3: The History of Sexuality (Le Souci de Soi) London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. 18 Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, With an Afterword by Michel Foucault, Brighton: The Harvester Press. 19 This succession has been seen as divided into two distinct periods with corresponding different methodological approaches. This is the line adopted by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982). For a refutation of such a discernible break in Foucault’s work, see chapter 3 of Edkins, J. (1997) Technologising the International: Pictures of Hunger, Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Doctoral thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth). In contrast it is significant that Alan Sheridan, a sensitive ‘commentator’ of Foucault’s works, finds an emergence of themes starting with his first publication, Maladie Mentale et Psychologie, that continues through to The History of Sexuality; Sheridan, A. (1980). 20 See point 5 of the ‘Foreword to the English edition’ of Foucault, (1970a). However, in his next ‘theoretical’ publication, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault, (1972) concedes that ‘the problem of structure’ arises (p. 16). 21 Foucault, (1970a) p. 342. 22 Foucault, (1972) p. 17. 23 Foucault, (1982). 24 Foucault, M. (1984b) ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books, p. 351. 25 Foucault, M. (1984a) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books. 26 Sheridan, (1980) p. 221. 27 Quoted by Sheridan, (1980) p. 222. 28 Foucault, (1970a) p. xvii.


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29 Foucault, M. (1977b) ‘History of Systems of Thought’, in Bouchard, D. F. (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, p. 200. 30 Foucault, (1970a) p. ix. 31 Foucault, (1970a) pp. x–xi. 32 Foucault, (1970a) p. xiii. 33 Foucault, (1972) p. 207. 34 Foucault, (1972) pp. 48–9. 35 Foucault, (1991b) pp. 53–55. 36 Foucault, (1991b) pp. 59–60. 37 Foucault, M. (1988c) ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, in Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. H., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. 38 Foucault, (1982) p. 210. 39 Foucault, (1979) p. 102. 40 Foucault, M. (1980h) ‘Two Lectures: Lecture 1, 7 January 1976’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 92. 41 Foucault, (1980g) p. 119. 42 Foucault, M. (1980i) ‘Two Lectures: Lecture 2, 14 January 1976’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 93. 43 Foucault, (1982) p. 222. 44 Foucault, (1982) p. 224. 45 Foucault, (1980i) pp. 96–99. 46 Foucault, (1980i) p. 101. 47 Foucault, (1980i) p. 102. 48 Foucault, (1980i) p. 93. 49 Foucault, M. (1980e) ‘Prison Talk’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press p. 39. 50 Foucault, M. (1980f) ‘Questions on Geography’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press. 51 Foucault, (1979) p. 93. 52 Foucault, M. (1980d) ‘Powers and Strategies’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 142. 53 Foucault, M. (1980c) ‘Madness and Civilisation’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press. 54 Foucault, (1980g) p. 131. 55 Foucault, (1977a) p. 194. 56 Foucault, (1977a) p. 304. 57 Foucault, M. (1980a) ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 194. 58 Foucault, (1979) p. 139. 59 Foucault, (1979) p. 141. 60 Foucault, (1979) p. 143. 61 Foucault, M. (Sheridan, A. M., trans.) (1973) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Perception, London: Tavistock Publications. 62 Foucault, (1979) pp. 17–18.

94 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

System building and ‘game openings’ for ecological relations Foucault, (1977a) pp. 27–28. Foucault, (1980i) p. 93. Foucault, (1980i) p. 107. Foucault, (1980g). Foucault, (1979) p. 100. Foucault, (1972) p. 46. Foucault, (1979) p. 101. See the introduction to Foucault, (1970b) by Robert Young; also Sheridan, (1980). Foucault, (1970b) p. 52. Foucault, (1970b) pp. 52–64. Foucault, (1977a) p. 194. Foucault, (1970a) p. 340. Foucault, (1970b) pp. 65–66. Foucault, (1988a) p. 68. Cf. Machiavelli, N. (Thomson, N. H., trans.) (1992) The Prince, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Foucault, (1982) p. 216 Foucault, (1982) pp. 215–216. Foucault, (1970a) p. 308. Foucault, (1970a) p. 345. Foucault, (1970a) pp. 342–343. Foucault, (1991b) p. 55. Foucault, (1991b) p. 59. Foucault, (1972) p. 205. Foucault, (1970a) p. 342. Foucault, (1977b) p. 199. Cf. Walker, R. B. J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, (1970a) p. 313. Foucault, (1970a) pp. 322–323. Foucault, (1970a) p. 312. Foucault, (1970a) p. 387. Chapter 10 of Foucault, (1970a). Foucault, (1970a) p. 348. Foucault, (1970a) p. 336. Foucault, (1972) pp. 205–206. Foucault, (1970a) p. 364. Foucault, (1970b) p. 68. Foucault, (1980h) p. 80. Foucault, (1980h) p. 81. Foucault, (1980h) p. 83 Foucault, (1980h) p. 81 (italics in original). Foucault, (1980h) pp. 81–82. Foucault, (1984a) p. 88. Foucault, (1991c) pp. 76–7. Foucault, (1984a) p. 96. Foucault, (1982) p. 216. Foucault, (1984a) p. 97. Soper, K. (1986) Humanism and Anti-Humanism, London: Hutchinson. Foucault quoted by Martin, R. (1988) ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault, October 25, 1982’, in Martin, L. H., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. H., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: The University of Michigan Press, p. 15.


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111 Foucault, (1984b) p. 343. 112 Foucault quoted by Watson, S. (1994) ‘ “Between tradition and oblivion” : Foucault, the complications of form, the literatures of reason, and the esthetics of existence’, in Gutting, G. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 263. 113 Foucault, (1984b) p. 343. 114 Foucault in Elders, (1974) p. 139 (italics in original). 115 Foucault, (1982). 116 Foucault, (1982) p. 208. 117 Foucault, (1982) p. 208. 118 Foucault, M. (1984d) ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books, p. 384. 119 Foucault, M. and Deluze, G. (1977) ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Bouchard, D. F. (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, p. 208. 120 Foucault and Deluze, (1977) p. 208. 121 Foucault, M. (1980b) ‘The History of Sexuality’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) (Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mapham, J. and Soper, K., trans) Power – Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, p. 193. 122 Miller, (1993) p. 189. 123 Foucault quoted by Miller, (1993), p. 325. 124 Miller, (1993) p. 92. 125 Foucault, (1972) p. 14. 126 See remarks by Daniel Defert, Foucault’s long-term partner, in Miller, (1993) p. 351. 127 See Foucault, (1979), ch. 5: ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’. 128 Foucault, M. (1984e) ‘What is an Author?’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books, p. 101. 129 Foucault, M. (1988b) ‘The Masked Philosopher’, in Kritzman, L. D. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture – Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, London: Routledge. 130 Foucault, (1972) p. 17. 131 Sheridan, (1980). 132 Foucault quoted by Martin, (1988) p. 9. 133 Foucault in Elders, F. (ed.) (1974) ‘Human Nature: Justice versus Power’, with Chomsky, N. and Foucault, M., in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir Press, Ltd., p. 171. 134 Foucault, (1980g) p. 133. 135 Foucault quoted by Martin, (1988) p. 10. 136 Foucault in Elders, (1974) p. 171. 137 Foucault, M. (1991a) ‘Discourse on Power’, in Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, (Goldstein, R. J. and Cascaito, J., trans.) New York: Semiotext(e). 138 Foucault, M. (1989a) ‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’, in Lotringer, S. (ed.) Foucault Live: (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984) Michel Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e). 139 Foucault, M. (1989b) ‘Truth is in the Future’, in Lotringer, S. (ed.) Foucault Live: (Collected Interviews, 1961–1984) Michel Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e). 140 Sheridan, (1980) p. 220. 141 Kritzman, L. D. (ed.) (1988) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture – Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, London: Routledge, p. xxiv. 142 Foucault, M. (1988d) ‘Practising Criticism’, in Kritzman, L. D. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture – Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, London: Routledge, p. 156.

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143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Foucault, (1980d) p. 145. Foucault, (1982) p. 208. Foucault, (1982) p. 208. Foucault, (1982) p. 208. Foucault, (1982) p. 209. Foucault, (1982) p. 209. Foucault, (1982) p. 209. Foucault, (1982) p. 216. Foucault, (1970b) p. 67. Foucault, (1982) p. 211. Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, London: Penguin Books, p. 378.

4

Ecological relations The case of women

This is the first of a series of three chapters illustrating the Foucauldian methodology outlined in the preceding chapter. Women provide the first illustrative subjects comprising a category that has been socially and politically relegated and oppressed according to the prevailing philosophical narratives that are rooted in a naturalised epistemology, as Chapter 1 delineated. This ‘case-study’, like the following two focusing upon nonhuman animals and indigenous peoples, attempts to penetrate the unashamed history of how ‘dominant identities congratulate themselves through the production and naturalization’ of those who are strange,1 whether by gender, ethnicity, or physiology, in search of an inclusive politicisation of ecological relations. This text aims to implicitly reveal the minimalist politicisation of IR by presenting an alternative theorisation that allows for interdependence of all diverse relations upon earth, without dismissing the importance of skewed power relationships. The Foucauldian analytical metatheory allows for a cognitive and conceptual hold on to the subject: ‘Women’. This categorisation, whether in its essentialised interpretation that necessarily entails a reversal of patriarchal hierarchisation yet maintains this paradigmatic frame nonetheless, or in its interpretation as the diverse multiplicity of these constitutive subjects, insists upon their input as nonsilenced and noninnocent relations worthy of study and scrutiny in an ecologically revised IR. A feminist perspective deconstructs patriarchal philosophy and institutions that deny political space to women, which in doing so simultaneously reify the ‘naturalisation’ and conceptual objectification of women. When women reassert their status as political subjects on terms that are not male biased, that is, ‘to return as a woman and be heard’,2 they usurp power, but also disturbingly, for patriarchy, cause its fragmentation. In effect, the manipulation of power is revealed. Thus this chapter will overthrow the great philosophical and political lie that translates man as generic for human3 and question the liberal opening of the political space for mankind to women as well. Consequently, it will engage with the poststructuralist debate of the constitution of the ‘plenary subject’.4 It has been suggested that in focusing upon women, described as a male categorical, even if ‘special’, positioning the ‘broader, relational concept of

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gender’, which allows for the socio-cultural contextualisation of women and men and of the power relationships involved, is subsumed and negated.5 So women are included as ‘objects of policy’ into agendas framed by male interests and accredited with the disproportionate and onerous responsibility of ecological degradation, as the problem, victims or saviours.6 However, a focus upon women illuminates gender issues and, in particular, the dichotomous relationship of masculinity versus femininity that underpins epistemological parameters of political thinking and practice. Within this dichotomy the male side is privileged at the expense and the denigration of the female position, which is inseparably linked within a grid of further dichotomies that legitimise and reinforce each other. These include human–nonhuman, white–black, modern–traditional and development–un(der)development; all originate from the abstraction and devaluation of nature as opposed to culture. For the domination and pacification of nature is rendered possible on the basis of its cultural conception by political philosophy as objective and passive matter, as outlined in Chapter 1. This foundational epistemology is based upon the self-reproducing and exclusive power of the master culture. Such a patriarchal construction sanctions exploitation of ‘mother nature’ and justifies appropriation of human mothers and/or our labour as an extension of the same logic. Women, (as well as nonhumans and indigenous peoples) are oppressed politically and materially because of the epistemological conceptualisation of our realities by those residing, conceptually, within the power-heavy side of the inequitable balance. This theory produces practice that is institutionally replicated on a global scale, of either dismissal of the integral worth of the underside or abuse of our labour and produce. There is no integration of this polarised positioning when masculine women move camps, for the dichotomous relationship remains in place and the majority of women continue to have their lives denigrated in objective fashion. Breaking apart the gender dichotomy is one step in unravelling the oppressive and exploitative matrix that legitimises the violence towards women. Inversely, a focus upon women can reveal our location and reasons for such positioning, by opening up the falsehood of gender neutrality, disclosing the un(der)representation of women by ourselves and for ourselves. This is seen clearly when a gendered perspective reveals the disparities in economic status between men and women7 and the actual increased deprivation of women in political societies that are prominently androcentric when economic sanctions are imposed.8 In breaking the silence and re-entering the space of conceptualisation and policy formulation, by refusing to continue to allow males to reinterpret our interests, social relations are shown to be contingently naturalised and amenable to reconstruction along less injurious lines. A focus upon women remains fundamental for the improvement of life conditions and the emancipation of identities, actually and symbolically, without necessarily negating difference. So, although there remains a need to be wary of any presumptions of solidarity expressed by means of a unifying category, which implicitly exclude those who do not fit the normative

Ecological relations: the case of women 99 construction, the term, ‘women’, also may be regarded as ‘a site of permanent openness and resignifiability’. Deconstruction of ‘women’ allows the term to reach into ‘a future of multiple significations, to emancipate it from the maternal or racist ontologies to which it has been restricted, and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear’.9 Although conceptual space is not closed to the argument that biological experiences unique to women’s bodies confer a different understanding of the sacredness of life and the kinship of all mammalian animals than is comprehended by males, it is the social interpretation of this separate potential experience that matters. The attribution of a hierarchical dualism presupposed from such a ‘body-based argument’10 shields the central role of power, and of who defines this power, by single-mindedly focusing upon biology, a supposed objective science. In addition, simply because women are able to bear children does not mean that doing so is essential to our nature. Contraception clarifies this distinction: the ability to give birth can now be suppressed, and there are powerful ecological pressures in favor of this. In this context, it is important that biology not be our destiny.11 Nevertheless, a social constructivist reading of women’s bodily realities, whereby women’s ‘essential’ reproductive capabilities and nurturing roles are played down, and/or symbolic and actual violence against women and against nature is reconstructed, can collude with patriarchally defined normative roles, reproducing oppression, by insisting upon women as secondary men. That is, by rejecting a realisation that women’s experiences may differ from those of men, it means that they have nothing to contribute to knowledge, nor society, apart from adding to the male agenda.12 In stressing a holistic perspective of relations, diversity and difference are respected. Thus valuing afresh motherhood and the parenting and raising of children and the maintaining of comfortable habitats and cohesive communities as the most highly productive work of society – rather than the most de-valued, as under patriarchal values and economics where these tasks are ignored and underpaid.13 Translated into grass-roots politics this theoretical perspective ensures inclusivity. Medha Paktar, leader of the Narmada movement that has fought against the Sarder Sarovar dam project in India which would have entailed the displacement of 250,000 families, said that her fighting commitment was neither for the environment or for women, but for all those politically marginalised, ‘downtrodden’ people, to be able ‘to live with dignity’.14 Thus, feminist enquiry too may, in dialectical fashion, be receptive to reformulation, on the basis of the diversity and plurality of women’s identities,

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life-experiences and aspirations.15 This is particularly so where the play upon the term, relations, ensures an open and responsive conceptual site of diversity and the emphasis upon ecological insists upon the contingent contextualisation of these pluralistic subjects within a location that has bearing upon epistemological constructions. Ecofeminism (ecological feminism) is one result of this critique-as-process. It explicitly arises from the linkage of women with ecological conditions, whether metaphorical or actual, and argues for a revaluing and repoliticisation of the epistemological positioning deriving from structural power relations determined to exclude women.16 Indeed, ecofeminism has been said to be ‘feminism taken to its logical conclusion, because it theorizes the interrelations among self, societies, and nature’.17 It has been argued that the political praxis of ecofeminism, arising from the conjunction of four dominant forms of oppression, that is, those created by gender, race, class, and nature, holds the potential to radically transform the conceptual binary structures of social oppression. It does more than simply reversing the dichotomised constructs, which can only lead to new epistemological biases and forms of oppression.18 Emancipation of both men and women will arrive via critique and deconstruction of dichotomised gender structures.19 Indeed, ‘[u]ngendering world politics requires a serious thinking about what it means to be human and how we might organize ourselves in more cooperative, mutually respectful ways.’20 However, if an attempt is made to avoid patriarchally imposed dichotomisation and to transcend the gendered dualism that has determined ‘the modern political landscape’ and its ‘field of multiple exclusion and control’, yet, ends up reconfirming the orthodoxy of dualistic thinking by ‘affirming and reconceptualising the underside, nature’, then the dualistic perspective is simultaneously reified. Holding on to the view of women as the conceptually singular ‘angel in the ecosystem’, even if within the remits of a democratically reformulated notion of rationality – one that differs from ‘the master mould’, in effect does little theoretically other than essentialise and idolise the harsh experiences of women in different political and ecological contexts.21 Furthermore, to lend support to essentialising myths does nothing other than perpetuate the power of men over subordinate women, bolstering ‘the claim that women are naive in matters relating to international politics’.22 To continue to normalise utilitarian relationships for the benefit of patriarchy reifies the empirical subordination of women; patriarchally defined epistemology, purported to be ontology, remains undisturbed. The determining role of theory to practice and specifically the power relations involved in this process are unveiled in the following discursive, Foucauldian discussion of women as ecological relations. Foucault’s contribution is the theoretical and strategical clearing of space to allow the suppressed to voice their opinions and speak as free subjects, struggling no more nor less than any other being within the pervasive web of social power relations. In clearing the space for marginalised women to ‘live with dignity’,

Ecological relations: the case of women 101 that is, according to our own, self-consciously deliberated regulations, the cultural diversity of this earth is enriched. Cultural diversity, like the necessity for biological diversity for maintaining an expansive genetic pool, is an essential prelude for the maintenance of diverse forms of knowledge and ways of behaving that will expand and deepen human understanding of survival upon earth.23 In sum, women as ecological relations are complex, elusive, resistant of categorisation and wary of the need to be included within the title of (hu)man and his realm of politics. The Foucauldian exegesis will illustrate a genealogical manifestation of the varied possible political locations of women, beginning with the common practice of objectification. This first section amounts to a descriptive account of women’s positions; the following probes deeper to investigate the forces that define and enclose women as objects, leading into a narration of women’s experiences in vigorously and autonomously reasserting our subject status. Ultimately, the power of women is mediated in the struggle with vested patriarchal constructions of the epistemological frames of reference upon which IR rests. Nonetheless, in readjusting our method of looking and hearing, it is found that women, in this case, are powerful subjects too, with the ability to disturb and redefine what is accepted, epistemologically, as ontology. In this regard, this ‘case’ is one step towards a more inclusive and holistic reframing of political theory that holds the potential to allow for a reverential appreciation of the ecological base to life.

The objectification of women: life, language and labour The following two quotations affirm the material and symbolic association of women and nature epistemologically locking both into a powerfully charged matrix of structural devaluation: In 1972, a male member of India’s Planning Commission admitted in a public lecture that if men had to fetch water, the country’s 230,000 villages all would have drinking water after 25 years of planned economic development.24 Why women? Because our present patriarchy enshrines together the hatred of women and the hatred of nature. In defying this patriarchy we are loyal to future generations and to life and this planet itself.25 Empirically and conceptually, it can be seen that present power relations reflect a gender-biased epistemological construction of the world, dismissing ontological bases of ecological interdependence and the whole body of humanity and thereby reconstructing a specific, singular and abstract epistemology which objectifies women. The roles that women carry out in reproducing life are naturalised and depoliticised.

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The reproduction of life The reproduction and maintenance of society is predominantly women’s work. However, it is not actually valued as work, since caring for children, fetching water and firewood, preparing meals, maintaining the home and so on are not immediately economically productive and take place in discrete, private spheres. Distinct, conceptual and actual boundaries separate women and children from men on the basis of this gendered ordering. As such women (and children) are kept in the background, cognitively and actually, invisibly ensuring the comfort of the male decision-makers and the uninterrupted business of politics.26 The conceptual location and equation of women with children, that necessarily rationalises both as secondary citizens on the basis of patriarchally constructed economic criteria, arises from the biological abilities of women to give birth and breast feed a child/children. In terms of the master logic of economics, the mother is incapacitated – unable to participate in the public arena of the market and politics. This socially constructed disability denigrates the value of new life and the perpetuation of society. The father, thus, is not only biologically separated from the birthing and nurturing processes, but also culturally kept distant, for he must align himself with the public, as opposed to the private, sphere and with the economically productive realm, as opposed to the socially reproductive side; the mother is objectified as irrationally lactating, the father the rational subject and provider. The institution of marriage can be portrayed as a dichotomous relationship that reinforces and legitimises this objectification of women. The accumulative culmination of the birthing process is a growth in population numbers and increased demands upon the ecological and socio-economic fabric of life. Conversely, successive generations, particularly in locations of poverty and cultural contexts that advocate communitarianism, provide a guarantee of life maintenance for their elders. Where survival depends upon an overstretched ecosystem, from which the women must feed the family, ironically it is deemed necessary to have more children to help her cultivate the land, in contrast to those women in conditions of food abundance. Thus in conditions of extreme poverty, where child mortality is high, more children are required to ensure the greatest possible welfare for the household. Whereas in Western countries, where disposable income is not so limited and an individualist discourse are pervasive in society, few children are the norm. In summary, ‘high birth rates’ indicate nothing so much as a ‘distress signal that people’s survival is endangered’.27 Women of Third World countries, whose economic and hence political significance is regarded as minimal, have become scapegoated as disproportionately responsible for global population growth and are subject, individually, to bodily intervention by the state and/or international agencies. Reproduction, rather than being recognised as a socio-cultural choice by a woman, generally in association with her male partner, is usurped from the

Ecological relations: the case of women 103 personal arena by global dictates. Ironically, such global policies implicitly acknowledge the feminist slogan – the personal is political – without, of course, accrediting either dignity or an equivalence of subjectivity to these victims. Such population control programmes range from literacy programmes sponsored by the World Bank to bribery in exchange for submission to undergo an operation of permanent sterilisation (a tubectomy), subjection to carcinogenic chemical contraception, outlawed in the Western world, or methods such as intrauterine devices, which, if there is not effective, longterm medical care, can bring about infection, which can be lethal. Where the payment for female sterilisation is higher than that of a man’s wage and significantly greater than the household’s monthly income, poor women have effectively no choice over the (reproductive) condition of their bodies.28 ‘Earlier our bodies were controlled by men. Now they are controlled by our men and our government’, is one Bangladeshi woman’s verdict.29 In effect, ‘population control’ is a term for social engineering by an elite of (mostly male) outsiders. It amounts to a form of enclosure: a gender apartheid that is legitimised via institutionalisation,30 in its less violent manifestation. The World Health Organisation recognises that politically powerless groups, whether for economic, ethnic and/or religious reasons, not uncommonly have been ‘coerced to choose’ sterilisation or serious debilitating contraceptive methods; to the extent that the bodies of Third World women are not their own. Deprived of human autonomy and self-determination, they are politically regarded and scientifically treated as objects, responsible for the whole state’s reproduction. Indeed, a not unfair comparison of this phenomenon would be with factory farming of animals, for with ‘the standardization of fertility and the family, whether reproduction is restricted, selectively guided or artificially achieved, the path towards the industrial production of humanity in this one world has been entered upon’.31 These ‘programmes’ are carried out exclusively upon women, despite the fact that male sterilisation is a relatively uncomplicated and safe operation. Indeed, where a programme was targeted at men, the political backlash did not go unheeded. In India, a population control programme in 1976, involving enforced male sterilisation at mass vasectomy sites was so vigorously resisted and, more significantly, heard, that the sterilisation programme has returned to targeting exclusively women, despite the fact that surgical ligature of fallopian tubes is far more involved, unsafe and expensive.32 Female sterilisation is the most widely used form of contraception, globally – 30 per cent, compared to only 9 per cent for male sterilisation.33 That women cannot be heard at a similar volume despite the prolonged suffering and injustice meted out to them, is an indication that they are not regarded as political citizens worthy of equal respect. This reduction of women to our possible reproductive capabilities: our wombs,34 i.e., the ‘biologization of the woman . . . as a child-bearing instrument’,35 dispossesses us of our total capabilities by simplistically focusing upon a certain part of our anatomy. Biologically deterministic accounts of

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women’s social status, paraphrased by Freud’s assertion that ‘anatomy is destiny’, not only ignores, and hence devalues, the labour involved in giving birth to a child, but all associated nurturing, sustaining, and house-hold responsibilities are relegated as below political significance, and as merely ‘an extension of . . . physiology’. Women are not only perceived as consciously interacting ‘with nature’, but in animal-fashion as part ‘of nature’.36 The naturalisation of the human activity of choosing to conceive and reproduce life entails its depoliticisation and the ensuing disrespect towards continued sustenance of life. This perspective has real consequences for women; ontologically women’s bodies are made to reflect patriarchal epistemological constructions. Women become locked into this objectifying gaze. Modern rationality and the institutionalisation of the science of medicine sanction this public gaze and control of women’s bodies by professionals, i.e., doctors, who are traditionally men. In Victorian England, the biological functions of a woman were reclassified as ‘pathological’. Women were ‘destined’ to be perpetually ‘ill’; furthermore, they were considered mentally ill if they attempted to act outside their defined, feminine role.37 Educating girls and women was even considered to adversely impact upon the woman’s ability to give birth to a healthy child; ‘an inverse relationship between the development of the mind and the development of the uterus’38 was constructed to constrain the lives of females. To conceive women as the dichotomised Other leads unproblematically to legitimised structural violence against women. Vandana Shiva details the practices and costs, in rupees and lives, of getting rid of the ‘dispensable sex’, legitimised by past prejudices and new biases against women and girls.39 ‘Woman-hating rituals’, including female circumcision, genital mutilation, (self-)immolation and rape, pursue the ‘purification’ of women who may have been or may be (we cannot help ourselves, being (closer to) animals) defiant of male-constructed ideas of what it means to be ‘feminine’. Such ‘rituals’ may vary in form and in intensity yet are cross-cultural.40 Politically and legally this has been translated into the categorisation of (irresponsible) women (as in the case of children) to the status of minors requiring permanent guardianship by a (responsible) adult male. Thus ‘male hegemony’ is established culturally, politically and economically on the basis of a genderbiased reading of nature.41 Further, women can be conceptualised as objective ‘environmental markers’ who may pose a threat to foetal life rather than being the very condition of its existence.42 Not infrequently women come to be regarded as secondary to the foetus/baby: an objective carrier whose behaviour needs to be disciplined for the health of the child.43 On the other hand, because we are biologically able to give birth, we are concerned with reproducing healthy children. Not infrequently, when socio-economically and politically marginalised, we find ourselves acting involuntarily as ‘ecological markers’ for the levels of toxicity in the surrounding environment, giving birth to deformed, severely ill babies, if they are not stillborn, when the environment is

Ecological relations: the case of women 105 poisoned.44 Women thus have an interest in ensuring the non-pollution of water sources and land. That this should be the preserve of women is imposed upon women by the prevailing, Cartesian dualist separation of life from culture. Such ‘body-based’ arguments mystify physiological differences in experience for men and women with social differences.45 Not all women are mothers or wish to be; motherhood is not essential to womanhood. There is a need to be wary of conflating womanhood with motherhood.46 In addition, historically child conception has always been subject to conscious decision making and women have rarely been ‘helpless victims of the generative forces of their bodies, but learned to influence them’.47 Examples of the manipulation of women’s choices to reproduce are the population control programmes in China and India which have discriminated against one half of humanity and brought about widespread, even the normalisation of, female foeticide, infanticide, death of girls and a general denigration of the dignity of females. Patriarchally determined societal values have led to an international hegemony, quantitatively, of male children, a severe distortion of sex ratios and a void of approximately 98 million girls and women, including 30 million females in India alone over the last two decades.48 The vilification of women results in a wholesale denigration of life. That life is objectified in such a dismissive manner is a callous indictment for the future. Language Objectification is made explicit and reconfirmed through its articulation, reifying the ‘backgrounding and instrumentalization of nature and women . . . Systematic backgrounding and systematic devaluation are perceptually ingrained, forms of not noticing, not seeing.’49 Accordingly, women are categorised as a singular entity, which has limiting consequences. This patriarchally constructed discourse, that associates us with nature, is said to be biological, material, spiritual, the result of social manipulation, and/or technological domination. Whichever, women cannot, linguistically, evade this explicit positioning as an intermediary between man and nature.50 The theorisation and legal enforcement in society of this ‘male gaze’51 has not gone entirely unnoticed in political philosophy52 and yet persists. It has been dubbed ‘the enclosure of women’; where, as we have seen, the ‘nature’ of women has ensured our control as a ‘reservoir of resources – future human resources’.53 Objectification, when defended, is legitimated in terms of chivalry that does nothing to accord equivalent status to women. Women and nature, this argument maintains, require shelter, as their bodies shelter the origins of life. Here the bodies and choices of women are controlled by means of the disciplines of reproductive and visualising technologies; autonomy is wrenched from an individual woman’s domain for the abstract technoscientific realm is considered as ‘other-worldly’, specific to the realm of culture and beyond

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political contestation. Thus is politics by-passed in the shift from nature to technoscience and women remain excluded. Even when the ‘dis-ease’ of contemporary patriarchal culture is recognised as detrimental to sustainable life on earth and a rebalancing towards ‘the feminine’ advocated, in favour of the ‘softer’ qualities of emotional, empathetic and holistic consciousness, such an essentialised reappraisal of women’s connection with nature does not escape the dominant patriarchal logic that objectifies us, leading to subordination and oppression.54 This argument is premised upon the rationale that there exists an equal ratio of power in gender relations. Essentialist accounts of femininity remain ‘inimical to gender analysis’ and lead to ‘conservative and regressive conclusions’.55 For they do not address the socially constructed power relations involved and, explicitly, women’s lack of involvement in this constructed discourse. Women continue to be regarded as ‘sites for the construction of others’ discourses’ or as embodying an ‘emissary’ location somewhere between man and nature;56 ‘the trouble is that even in the twentieth century, women under capitalist patriarchy are “to be seen and not heard”. As “others”, objects in a system of domination, women are looked at, manipulated, used, and finally abused.’57 To regard women as secondary humans in this socio-political world, as objects to the subject of mankind, is unproblematic when the dominant epistemological understanding is untroubled by the void of participation by women, themselves. Metaphorical association with ‘nature’ has a long lineage, which has not necessarily implied disrespect. Pre-modern associations of earth with the nurturing mother, and/or a female deity58 translated into an ‘organic cosmology’ that imposed sensitivity and respect for all relationships in a holistic manner.59 For example, Chief Smohalla’s perplexity: You ask me to plough the ground: shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it to be rich like white men; but how dare I cut off my mother’s hair.60 In the modern world, this world-view is incomprehensible and thus belittled. Modern constructions of identity insist upon the denigration of natural associations, as Chapter 1 testified. Language filtered through conceptual binaries where culture succeeds ‘nature’, as we shall see in the following section, hijacks and reproduces this proud refusal of a modern way of life. So those disturbed by this ‘strange’ epistemological formulation of the world naturalise and subjugate such a perspective.61 By virtue of identification with ‘nature’, both earth and, accordingly, womankind, become mere matter to be usurped and exploited. Both perspectives objectify women – either in idolatrous or misogynistic ways. Indeed, both women and nature have been the butt of ‘parallel patriarchal attitudes’.62 Women, like animals in a humanconstructed world, are ‘the absent referent’ in a patriarchal structure. That is, where mankind is generic for humankind but is constructed upon the ideal of

Ecological relations: the case of women 107 man and not woman.63 Denial of inclusion as subjects in political discourse has a long history, as our language constantly reifies. It has been argued that a gendered contrast in epistemological understanding of life becomes problematic only when language, a unitary structuring of thought, is introduced. Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, found that language used by women suggested a greater ‘natural’ inclination, compared to men, to be caring and take responsibility.64 However, language is a patriarchal structure as the history of mankind reminds us. As bell hooks constantly reminds us ‘language is also a place of struggle’; the oppressed and the oppressor do not share the same voice. ‘Silenced. We fear those who speak about us, who do not speak to us and with us’ who only allow us to ‘speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing.’65 On the other hand, language as a social construction has ‘generative capacities’ to reify constantly the privileging of patriarchy. As Bourdieu explains, ‘within certain limits, symbolic structures have an altogether extraordinary power of constitution which has been greatly underestimated.’66 The history of language is axiomatic: language reflects social biases. As Wittgenstein has stated, knowledge cannot reflect the certainty of language; belief is a judgment that is taught within a system.67 Silencing of language, of the articulation and transmission of thoughts is an outcome of power relations, and throughout much of Western history, has been gendered.68 Women’s language is political because it speaks from the margins, and implicitly critiques the meaningfulness of the dominant, patriarchal discourse. However, to conflate the public and private realms as equivalently political, is to dissipate the basis for political activity and emancipation from oppression of those most needy, if both ‘spheres and activities are characterized in a single, “privatized ” public language’. ‘It is the isolation and debasement of women under terms of male-dominated ideology and social structures that must be fought, not the activity, the humanizing imperative, of mothering, or of being a parent, itself.’69 If, following Gilligan, women use a language that is distinctly moral and is not afraid of voicing concern for others, it constitutes a foundational principle, profoundly in opposition to the abstract language of the public domain. Some feminists have positively adopted this dichotomised perspective of women, (ab)using male readings of nature. An example is Susan Griffith’s ‘Women and Nature’: He says that woman speaks with nature . . . He says that he is not part of this world . . . He sets himself apart from woman and nature . . . We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

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Ecological relations: the case of women We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.70

Women are privileged, because of their association with nature, rather than undermined. Our analogous affiliation with animals is embraced; we are the special people, it affirms, because we can reside in and communicate with both worlds. Since this approach is advocated to counter the prevalent ambivalence to sustaining life because it questions ‘the mad absurdity of the entire socio-economic/cultural structure’ that ‘is not merely antifeminine, it is antihuman, antilife’,71 it is unsurprising that some ecofeminists regard this perspective as legitimate.72 In opposition, such ecofeminist tracts are deplored, critiqued as abetting the objectification of women, stripped of their ‘liberatory ideology’ and purported to represent ‘a force for irrationalism’.73 If ecofeminism is to be an emancipatory and oppositional movement, it is argued, embracing ‘a feminine connection with nature seems to many to be regressive and insulting, summoning up images of women as passive, reproductive animals, contented cows immersed in the body and in unreflecting experiencing of life.’74 Theoretically this may lead only to an ‘illusion of gender awareness’ based upon a superficial understanding of the coupling together of women and the environment.75 Between these two interpretations of the patriarchal discourse that links women with nature, there exists a complex and dense discussion addressing the possible understandings of what it is to be human in the highly politicised world of nature and the naturalised world of politics, and specifically the contributions of radical interpretations of feminism.76 Women’s ‘lived expertise’ at the receiving end of power relationships and institutional forms of control, means that we have much to contribute.77 The ‘personal is political’ and this political power questions the public, patriarchal construction of what is masculine and what is not: therefore, feminine and dismissed.78 However, the integrated dualisms of culture–nature and mankind–woman remain, confining exclusively autonomy, rationality and agency as subjects to the first, privileged side of the dualism. Woman, like nature, is the object to the male subject’s culture; the separate, distorted and inadequate mirror image to Western man, whose epistemological foundations to theory and practice are found in an ‘objective’ science that is inherently gendered. Analogies in literature representing women as animals, such as Tennyson’s aphorism, ‘Man is the hunter, women is the game’,79 demonstrate and reify the multidimensional dualisms of patriarchy, and looking forward to the following case of nonhuman animals, sanction the actual exploitation of both. Labour Fundamental to political theorisation is the separation of politics from economics.80 However, within economics there exists a further dualistic division


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between the production of capital and the reproduction of life. The latter is normalised as free labour, since it produces no tangible, manufactured commodity that commands a cash price. Labour is defined according to Western male criteria for the accumulation of capital via the processing of nature’s wealth, following Adam Smith. The universalisation of this assumption has rendered women’s work and work dedicated to the reproduction of life, for example, caring for relatives, as unproductive and not worthy of respect.81 Women are generally placed within both undersides of these two integrated dualisms; relegated from the political realm to that of the economic realm, but relegated within the economic realm to the role of un(der)valued labourer, justified as an extension of the pervasively oppressive logic of binaries, that are inherently loaded against women and are presented as ontological foundations, rather than specific epistemological constructs. Yet, women have always been, and continue to be, central to the production of food and thus the subsistence of life. Nature and women have historically produced the subsistence of life; working together in harmony with nature, women have cultivated the land, collected water, tended animals, gathered medicinal herbs and fuel wood, providing for their adult males, children, and themselves, often in that order of priority.82 Indeed, in Africa women produce almost 80 per cent of the total agricultural output and worldwide the figure is estimated at 50 per cent; globally agricultural production can be said to be increasingly feminised.83 Yet women are not considered farmers, by their own national governments, international development agencies, and even by their own adult male dependents.84 These figures are growing as men, increasingly, are lured from or forced off the land to compete in the Westernised, monetary world.85 Alternatively, with the commercialisation and technologisation of agriculture, producing cash crops for export, women’s workloads increase, in their effort to grow subsistence food for the family, increasingly on marginal plots of land.86 The denigration of women’s knowledge of agriculture and the ignorance and devaluation of their daily labour to maintain the fertility of the land, the health and warmth of their dependents – much of which is integral to the reproduction of life in a holistic sense – is in virtue of its minimal contribution to Western, capitalist policies.87 Women are responsible for the provision of water, fuel and food; this constitutes women’s ‘invisible’ and disproportionately onerous workload.88 A material interdependent relationship with the local ecosystem means that women are the first to suffer environmental degradation if the land quality or quantity is reduced, finding it increasingly arduous to farm staple crops to provide for their families. Accumulative ecological stress, impoverishment of ecosystems and degradation of cultivable lands over preceding generations has impacted discriminately and harshly upon women. Their former positive relationship with their local environment has been undermined from a position beyond their control, yet women are popularly perceived as exacerbating – the benign interpretation – or, even, as the perpetrators of ecological devastation. For, they are left with no option but to scour the environment further for food and

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fuel sources often in unsustainable fashion, much to their lament. On the other hand, they are also perceived as helpless and hapless victims of their environment. This metaphoric double-bind under which women struggle to live, and provide living conditions for their dependents, correlates with the also ambiguous ‘feminisation’ of nature, where nature is passively bounteous and an actively ruly, austere wilderness.89 Either way, both nature and women have been constructed as requiring control. Such metaphorical analogies have legitimised conceptual domination – of (hu)mankind over nature and men over women – and social hierarchisation. It has also been documented that when food supplies are short, it is women and female children who are first deprived; rates of malnutrition in India are significantly higher for girls than for boys.90 The related dualisms, revealed via a holistic and critical appraisal of women’s labour, re-situate women as objects throughout: The division of sexual labor, the low status associated with women’s work, and government apathy about the conditions under which human life is produced mean that the production of crops is regarded as more important than the production and sustenance of life. A focus on women’s role in the production and maintenance of life, therefore, is a way of questioning and subverting misplaced priorities, and to raise the question of how women’s access to and control over water and other production conditions can be achieved.91 This historically gendered material proximity to nature has not been accredited with significance; acceptance of this knowledge would upset patriarchally defined epistemology. Thus, the resourcefulness of nature and of women working in participatory harmony is violated when outsiders assert dichotomised understandings of relationships and ways of interacting with nature, resulting in epistemological reductionism and atomism for the women and their environment, and actual violence against both. Shiva finds this form of ontological reframing or colonisation to be a form of ‘maldevelopment’ since it is bereft of an informing feminine principle both metaphorically and in practice and therefore denies harmonious relations.92 Not only is it made more difficult to provide the conditions for the subsistence and continuation of life, also cultural and legal constraints are unequivocally and, not infrequently, violently restraining women’s autonomy to respond to these conditions. Access to, and ownership of land, revenue from cash crops, development loans, technical improvements, and local councils are all structured towards males to the exclusion of women. Women often lack the resources to alleviate their poverty93 and are always the first and most severely affected by structural adjustment programmes; indeed, Third World women not infrequently ‘serve as shock absorbers of economic crisis for their families’.94 Thus, patriarchal political institutions actively and constantly

Ecological relations: the case of women 111 objectify women, denigrating our knowledge and experiences in the process. As Shiva explains, on behalf of those denied the fundamental dignity of political self-representation, this is the result of the arbitrary boundaries which have been created between knowledge and ignorance, modern and primitive, value and non-value, [which] have established the possibility to colonize and control that which is free and self-regenerative. Women’s bodies, the seed and the soil, the sites of creative regeneration, have been turned into ‘passive’ objects which experts can manipulate for profit. The sources of renewal of life have thus been transformed into dead, inert and fragmented matter, mere ‘raw material’ waiting to be processed and manipulated into a finished product.95 It is interesting to compare Shiva’s modern indictment of the means of objectifying and, therefore, controlling women – akin to the imperialist practices which Third World colonial countries experienced – with Haraway’s postmodern tale of the way that, with technological advances, this paradigmatic objectifying gaze is reified. Control and extraction for financial gain remain constant factors alongside a romanticised awe of the natural/naturalised sphere: The fetus and the planet Earth are sibling seed worlds in technoscience . . . Life as a system to be managed . . . The fetus and the whole Earth concentrate the elixir of life as a complex system . . . Each image is about the origin of life in a postmodern world. Both . . . owe their existence as public objects to visualizing technologies . . . Yet . . . both provoke yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth and a soft, fleshy child. That is why these images are so ideologically powerful. They signify the immediately natural and embodied, over and against the constructed and disembodied.96 Whatever the temporal and geographical location, the way of perceiving is ideological for specific interests that have little ontological relevance to women. The equation of women as naturalised phenomena producing tangible life, recognised to be psychologically significant for humanity, are subjected to the logics of politico-economic management, rather than disturb the patriarchally-constructed dualism of subject–object. The products of women’s bodies and of our energies all contribute, actually and ideologically, to the patriarchal quest of the instrumental accumulation of capital.97 To the extent that, despite the objective and hence subordinate socio-political status accorded to women on the basis of our constructed affiliation with nature, ‘[o]ne finds not the absence of female/woman in the age of bio-politics, but their fruitful ubiquity, under the logics and social conditions of masculinist appropriation’.98 It is these ‘logics’ that will be scrutinised next.

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The ‘dividing practices’ This section will illuminate the practices and structures that create and reify the objectification of women. As we have seen, the identification and categorisation of women as naturalised objects is ingrained in the language and lives of both men and women. As such the prevalence and depth of this patriarchal construction requires a stance of incredulity towards ‘given’ facts and realities. Human nature is one such ‘given’ and not primordial, as Chapter 1 outlined. To quote Simone de Beauvoir: ‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.’99 The paradigmatic model for capitalist human evolution is based upon the myth of ‘man-the-hunter’; his ‘oppositional mirror twin’ being ‘woman the gatherer’.100 This is despite archaeological evidence revealing that basically he was ‘a parasite, not a producer’ dependent upon ‘the superior economic productivity’ of women, as ‘gatherers and early agriculturalists’. Yet, it was the male’s haphazard, predatory means of attaining food, rather than the actual daily subsistence provided by the women that came to be accredited with significance and reflected in hierarchical and exploitative social relations.101 This has become the basis for capitalist modes of production, where capital accumulation reflects the social positioning of men, based upon exploitative and subordinating behaviour towards women.102 The unified scientific rationalisation of this historical progress popularly emanates and proceeds from an intrinsically limited ‘Western, bourgeois, and masculine’ epistemology.103 As we have seen in the preceding section, the disproportionately unequal burden of labour carried out by women that is simultaneously denied public legitimacy and economic worth is the contemporary and globalised result of such patriarchal myths. Feeding on ‘women’s stolen energy’, because it is disrespected, appropriated and taken for granted, the patriarchally normalised definition of cultural and political matters objectifies both women and nature. So history ‘backgrounded’ women by systematically devaluing our contribution to the sustenance of the life of the community, and thereby initiated a vision of not seeing women’s worth.104 Carolyn Merchant traces the epistemological roots of this predominant paradigm to the European Scientific Revolution between 1500 and 1700.105 This was the pivotal point in history that distinguished between nature as a cosmic, living organism in favour of a view of nature as inert matter that could be studied and controlled like any other mechanical system. This reconceptualisation also brought about a dramatic re-evaluation of values; there no longer persisted any cultural restraints to acts of violence against nature, on the basis of an understanding of earth as alive and sensitive. On the contrary, a mechanistic world-view implied the necessary ‘domination and mastery of nature’. In turn these have come to be considered the ‘core concepts of the modern world’.106

Ecological relations: the case of women 113 Arising from this core concept was the metaphoric modern representation of women and nature as akin, that is, if not virginally fertile and subservient, then unpredictably wild. In practice this translated into a need for dominance. Thus, women as nature/nature as women needed to be shown, often forcefully, who was master. Just as ‘woman’s womb had . . . yielded to the forceps, so nature’s womb harboured secrets that through technology could be wrestled from her grasp for use in the improvement of the human condition.’107 Francis Bacon, popularly hailed as the ‘father of modern science’ and a man of not insignificant influence in the sixteenth century,108 ‘scientifically’ sanctioned the exploitation of nature with misogynous terminology; the baby must be brutally taken from the woman, who is not included in the term ‘human’: she is the object of the violent act. Similarly, the ‘disclosure of nature’s secrets’ is described in a language reeking of sexual violence: For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her . . . Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.109 He argued – invoking the imagery of the witch trials, tortures and killings that were not uncommon throughout Europe in the Middle Ages – that ‘the subjugation of disorder, [was] fundamental to the scientific method as power’.110 Directly, the violent disciplinary process of the feminisation of women, that is, of ensuring women complied to the modern man’s concept of female, was carried out over three centuries from the seventeenth century and had the effect of not only controlling women’s individual bodies, but also the social body; both were to submit passively to male authority. Indeed, Bacon is credited with providing ‘the language from which subsequent generations of scientists extracted a more consistent metaphor of lawful sexual domination’.111 This obsessive control of unruly women, ‘witches’, as naturalised objects, resulted in the patriarchal construction of women to that of the child-bearer excluded from the public economy. The productivity of women, which had been high in many fields in the Middle Ages, was reduced to their wombs. This reduction means a biologization of the woman: she appears primarily as a child-bearing instrument.112 Since women were thus perceived as irrational bodies, mid-wifery was an aberration; the newly emergent disciplines of modern science and medicine could only be practised by rational professionals, namely men of learning. The sanctioning of domination over both nature and women was given further metaphysical rationalisation by the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, who asserted that nature was merely ‘a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than

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inherent forces’.113 Cartesian logic declared the necessary epistemological separation of the master and the matter for Baconian experimental study of nature. Thus, nature cognitively became mankind’s possession. The empirical method proposed by Bacon required science and the male scientist to ‘be aggressive yet responsive, powerful yet benign, masterful yet subservient, shrewd yet innocent’ in dialectical fashion.114 This was explicitly carried over into the social science of political theory and is seen most clearly in Machiavelli’s play between the forces that govern the ‘Prince’ – ‘fortuna’ and ‘virtu’. The fifteen/sixteenth century political pragmatist, Niccolò Machiavelli, still regarded by many at the end of the twentieth century as a pre-eminent thinker of political power and leadership, personifies ‘fortuna’ as female and likens her ‘to one of those wild torrents which, when angry, overflow the plains, sweep away trees and houses, and carry off soil from one bank to throw it down upon the other’. Accordingly, he advises the male leader to be strong and ‘resist her’; ‘like a woman who to be kept under must be beaten and roughly handled’, modern political leadership requires a violent patriarch who will ‘command her with greater audacity’.115 Thus, there arose a parallel between the ‘persecution and burning of the mid-wives as witches’ and ‘the emergence of modern society’. Indeed, it has been said, ‘modern medicine and the male hegemony over this field were established on the base of millions of crushed, maimed, torn, disfigured, and finally burnt, female bodies’.116 Women became enclosed alongside the development of modern notions of science, including medicine, and the beginnings of appropriated capital.117 The systematic and structural methods of this historical event, that is, the sequestration of the humanity of women, persists still, and is constantly reified. As Cynthia Enloe shows so graphically, it takes power to maintain this modern rationality that divides the social world between the masculinised public domain and privatised, feminised underworld and to deny the former’s reliance upon the latter.118 Contemporary cultural purification processes for women who defy and deviate from patriarchal notions of womanhood range from virginity testing to genital mutilation, in order to check a woman’s supposedly insatiable sexuality and thereby impose (men’s) control over social relations. But as long as these many horror stories are ‘fragmented, compartmentalized, belittled’ we are powerless to not integrate the ‘male-made’ ways of knowing into human realities.119 Thus have biological functions been given social import, and the situation continues to be so, ensuring the discriminate authority to call oneself human: Reproduction – hormones, menstruation, and pregnancy – is used to infer and justify the female economic dependence brought about in the seventeenth-century transition from subsistence to capitalist modes of production. For women, this aspect of the Scientific Revolution did not bring about the presumed intellectual enlightenment, objectivity, and liberation from ancient assumptions traditionally accorded it.120

Ecological relations: the case of women 115 To conceptually allow for women’s participation in the capitalist labour force, the thesis of women’s ‘pathological’ irrationality needed to be discarded; hence the liberal attitude of including women as honorary men into political theorisation and the economic realm. This perspective does not allow for the revaluation of women’s generative and regenerative potentials and abilities, nor thereby upsets the patriarchal paradigm of social relations: the reproduction and sustenance of life, as carried out ‘privately’ largely by women continues to be suppressed. For example, ‘making babies’ is ‘individualized to the woman’ and cognitively excludes other social relations.121 Yet, ‘practices of international politics’ include biology and anthropology.122 Further, the ‘international is personal’ for the modern impetus, founded upon the dichotomous practices of domination that produce and circumscribe the feminised and privatised role for women, infuses the theorisation and rhetoric of world politics.123 This is reproduced within orthodox development discourse where women’s presence, role and contribution are discounted when the focus of development is the male head of the household, even if he is absent. For ‘development’ is a modern, linear project, founded upon the asymmetrical binaries of culture–nature, masculine–feminine, science–society, etc., and, therefore, inherently reductionist and logically exploitative. Indeed, the development discourse has been described as ‘one of the biggest most male-dominated, most world-dominating institutions’124 and is itself structurally conceived upon a dualistic assumption of undevelopment. Shiva terms this universalised drive for cumulative output from the land and the producers and maximisation of capital revenue as ‘maldevelopment’, since it depletes the local environment and strips autonomy from the local actors, primarily, women, marginalising them in the process.125 Constructed upon specifically Western and patriarchal concepts of progress, it is irrelevant to Third World conditions, ecologically and culturally, bringing about rapid destruction of the environment, that is, the fabric of life, and upsetting social relations, impacting most harshly upon women. In effect, unproblematised development is a continuation of colonialist policies of resource extraction for contextually abstract capitalists.126 This modern discourse has captured ‘the status of a certainty’127 legitimising itself as the new science, reducing epistemological frames of reality and ‘colonising’ all within its sweep: The reductionist categories of modern western scientific thought were categories that were intrinsically violent and destructive to nature as a producer, and to women as knowers. In this destruction of material and intellectual wealth, reductionist categories in science are dialectically linked to reductionist categories in economics which reduce all value to market value, and register only those processes that are monetised and involve cash transactions. Reductionist economics assumes that only paid labour produces value. On the one hand this leads to ignoring man’s dependence on the natural world, while on the other, it provides the

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Ecological relations: the case of women ideology of the gender division of labour such that women’s work in producing sustenance is treated as having no economic value even while it provides the basis of survival and well-being.128

To counter this, a group, Women in Development (WID), was established in the early 1970s by the women’s committee of a US nongovernmental organisation, which subsequently became influential during the UN decade for women (1975–85) resulting in WID advisors in international agencies to ensure standardisation of knowledge about women and their experiences in Third World economies. However, the development discourse still subsumed women.129 Despite the efforts of WID, the original patriarchal hegemony of development persisted. Cognitively marginalising women according to a restrictive definition of ‘productive’ work supports the metaphysics of Western epistemology that simplistically recreates value dichotomously and results in the intensification of women’s, particularly Third World women’s, political and economic impoverishment. Whatever their location, women are often defined as ‘dependent housewives’; even in cases where the men have migrated, leaving the woman, to provide for the family and denied independent status, legal ownership of the land she tills, and access to any forms of aid. Not unlike the fears of sixteenthcentury men, modern development planners are nervous that small-scale women farmers may act autonomously, that they may divert the profits from commodity production for export to use for their own consumption.130 This concept of development excludes the improvement of daily subsistence, with which women are most concerned. A study of workloads in an Indian agricultural community found that women contributed just under double that of the men’s energy expenditure and that as commercialisation is introduced, so women’s workload increases; yet its value is systematically undermined, since women produce for the daily sustenance of the family. This perceived decline in their contribution to society, that is, to the production of export commodities, leads to the devaluation of their status and of females in general. This is translated societally into the significantly higher percentages of undernourishment of female children compared to male children, female infanticide, abortion of female babies and violence against, even murder of, young brides because of increasingly exorbitant dowry demands. All these acts of violence against females run parallel with the ‘success’ of the green revolution in India, that is the development of export-led, globally-planned agriculture. The dichotomisation of society between the ‘ ‘‘masculinisation” of modern, chemical intensive and mechanised, capital intensive agriculture, and the “feminisation” of traditional subsistence food production which feeds the bulk of the rural poor’ is destructive of both social relations and of the environment.131 As Daly has argued, ‘patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia’, that is, a ‘state of living death’.132 The consequences of ecologically insensitive over-exploitation driven by global markets can be seen in the transformation of once fertile regions, such

Ecological relations: the case of women 117 as Northeast Brazil, formerly the ‘sugar-capital’ of the country, into droughtridden and poverty-stricken wastelands; where the disempowered pay, with their dignity and their lives; where the forced sterilisation of women and killings of street-children have been condoned as ‘population’ measures.133 Control of population is part of the development discourse that deliberately ignores the ecological destruction and social injustices caused by increased economic growth following Western patterns. Orthodox development discourse is founded upon Malthusian principles that equate population growth with cumulative ecological stress and increased social impoverishment, without taking into account global differences in impact upon the environment. This strain within the development discourse is reliant upon the separation of sexuality and procreation and thereby sanctions the relegation of the latter, which entails a social activity, in opposition to the former, which is embodied in the individual.134 Thus, it feeds into another dualism of individualism–communitarianism. Women are at the centre of this confusing mesh of epistemological control – blamed for over-populating the world and marginalised because we are reduced to sole procreators of society. The pluralistic realities of women’s lives are missed; women’s bodies are epistemologically remoulded to fit the dualities imposed upon them that originate in a nature that has been patriarchally constructed. The discourses of ‘science’ and ‘women’ have been construed as natural, camouflaging layers of dominance and subordination, respectively. Such logic, as Maria Mies pertinently points out, is in fact built upon a going away from Nature. Since the Enlightenment, this going away, this distancing from Nature has been considered a necessary precondition for emancipation, as a step from Nature to Culture, from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, from immanence to transcendence. This concept of emancipation, based on Man’s domination over Nature, ignores the fact that even modern man is born of woman, that he must eat food that comes from the earth, that he will die; and further that he can be alive, healthy and achieve fulfilment only as long as he retains an organic connection with Nature’s symbioses.135 This represents the refusal to recognise the interdependent linkage between humanity, modelled universally on Western man, and the ecosystem, institutionalised according to the logic of Enlightenment rationality, and results in the epistemological hegemony of patriarchal dominance of nature for selfserving ends. Faced with this conceptual and actual obstruction to self-fulfilment, women are left with three options from which to insist upon their integral capability and freedom to express themselves. Women then have three choices: 1

to regard neglect as a form of discrimination and fight to be included within the preconceived, that is, patriarchal paradigm;

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Ecological relations: the case of women to attempt to change the defining parameters to include perspectives from women’s life experiences; or to refuse to work within the given, patriarchal limits and construct parallel epistemologies, in opposition to patriarchal myths.

This generally constitutes the range of feminist debate. The discussion here locates the origins of feminist critique in the emergence of a philosophy that argued for the transcendence of humanity from nature and draws out the logics that posit the sophistry of the ecological realm as inert material for ‘Man’s’ consumption. Arising from such a dualistic cognitive frame was the naturalisation of all others within society, thereby legitimising oppressive societal relations. That women may use the arguments of objectification as a source of leverage for self-empowerment to reassert humanity as full subjects, without drawing upon the patriarchal stories of foundational devaluation and exploitation is the concern of the next section. The uprising of women against the metaphorical and actual subordination, and violence, against women constitutes a political act of great courage within academia and practice.136 For the ontological foundations informed by non-reductive and specific cultural and ecological contexts creating diverse epistemologies necessarily confront a singular, universalised Cartesian credo of Modern man. The following section depicts the success stories of women who have rallied to put forward political perspectives that reflect our concerns from a holistic understanding of society.

Becoming a subject This section rejects forms of ecofeminism that limit the potential for empowerment by and for women by insisting upon the maintenance of dualistic frames of reference in which women are naturalised, as of secondary significance,137 and will reveal the emancipation of women from objectified status. The corollary structures and patterns of violence against women and violence against the environment emanate, as we have seen in the preceding section from the same conceptual paradigm of reductionist binaries. This section moves beyond the uncritical attempt to provide equality by reversing the dynamics of dualism, which implies acceptance of the institutionalisation of the paradigm, to a commitment to non-reductive positions of selfempowerment that theorise from and for the diversity of women’s lives. Thus, versions of ecofeminism essentially equated with a ‘pre-modern’ and ‘intrinsically feminine’ revisioning of the natural world resulting in the worship of Mother Goddess, that slip into the morass of ‘feminarchy’, exemplify a continuation of the feminisation of nature and naturalisation of women according to patriarchal epistemology.138 Such attempts to challenge patriarchy are structurally constrained since they are metaphysically rooted in patriarchal constructs. Likewise any historical-materialist analyses are undermined by the powerful restrictions imposed by patriarchal constructions of

Ecological relations: the case of women 119 what counts symbolically, linguistically and institutionally within Western epistemology. In minority languages, as will be seen also in the case of indigenous peoples (Chapter 6), alternatives to the singular Western and patriarchal perspective may be retained; for example, the Maori language sustains the feminine connection with earth: the word, te whenua, means both afterbirth and land. Accordingly te whenua is returned after childbirth, as are corpses, following the belief that ‘the earth is the elemental womb to which we must all return . . . female in essence, she moves within the consciousness of many women’. In opposition is posited the ‘masculine indulgence’ to violently ravage and abuse the land and women, sustained by the alternative, dominant and glamorous myth of the heroic warrior.139 Within the modern, Western paradigm, such ‘feminism of uncritical reversal’,140 regards the feminine as privileged over a derided masculine realm; the dualistic patriarchal construction remains, if up-turned.141 Such ‘psycho-biologistic’ ecofeminism fails to alleviate the degradation of women, theoretically and politically.142 Rather, a starting point, for the re-evaluation of women as naturalised objects under the ‘male gaze’,143 is the belief that since ‘the subjugation of women and nature is a social construction, not a biologically determined fact, our position of inferiority can be changed’.144 In consciously wresting conceptual space for women from the patriarchally defined theorisation and structure of politics, ecofeminism, following Françoise d’Eaubonne’s definition,145 holds the potential to displace the dichotomous paradigms that determine normative relations. This is an approach that ‘confronts not only social institutions and practices, but the language and logics by which Western patriarchy constructs its relation to nature’.146 An example is Mary Daly’s project of Gyn/Ecology, which focuses upon the means of ‘mind/spirit/body pollution’ in ‘phallotechnic society’ legitimised structurally through myth and language. In ‘wrenching back some wordpower’, Gyn/Ecology is used ‘loosely’, to describe the science, that is the process of know-ing, of ‘loose’ women who choose to be subjects and not mere objects of enquiry. Gyn/Ecology is by and about women a-mazing all the male-authored ‘sciences of womankind,’ and weaving world tapestries of our own kind. . . . In contrast to gynecology, which depends upon fixation and dismemberment, Gyn/Ecology affirms that everything is connected.147 Thus, in conceptually clearing some space, women emerge as subjects, confounding the imposed societal myths and creating epistemologies reflective of our contextualised experiences. As such, attempts to belittle this discipline’s legitimacy and existence are met with a front of solidarity, despite its pluralistic constitution. However, like any discipline, ecofeminism is an abstraction, although with distinct origins, and subject to contingent reformulation; it is certainly not a metaphorical ‘tsunami, a freak tidal wave that has appeared out of nowhere’.148 Its subversive nature arises precisely because variants of

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ecology and feminism on which it is based are both upsetting of centuries of normalised politicisation. As a consequence, the ecofeminist message is unequivocally strong, calling for no part in the ‘rotten and carcinogenic’ system that women have gradually, with the progression of liberal forms of politics, been allowed to participate in.149 Ecofeminism is theoretically inclusive but, practically, may give the impression of exclusivity by intentionally upsetting the status quo, which, because defined according to male interests, has permitted political complacency for men: The need for a multilevered and reflexive epistemological stance is not often recognized by men, for whom patriarchal social reality is a relatively straightforward affair, in large part because the underbelly of their social life is held together by psychosocial maintenance work that women of most races are socialized to do. Women are thus already sensitized to meta-levels of communication as a result of the ‘master–slave dialectic’ that they find built into patriarchy. Furthermore, as women begin forging new cultural meanings of their own and such shared realities as feminist understanding, many men find themselves left behind – which can be a very disturbing experience.150 Ecofeminism is a diverse and powerful perspective. It is infused in dialectical fashion with cultural and ecological contextualised, ontological determinants producing plural and diverse epistemologies. Such a holistic perspective that comprehends and values the innate heurism of uncertainty and flux refutes singular conceptualisation and uncritical acceptance of epistemologies and ethics. Instead, it is constantly subject to reformulation according to ‘experience, cognition, epistemology and value systems in light of new conditions’.151 The transformative power of ecofeminism arises from its conceptual and actual premise of seeing and politicising culturally and ecologically embedded interdependent individuals. It is an approach that resists universalisms and nominalisms. It is also fundamentally ‘an activist-based movement’ with a core ‘vision of a society beyond militarism, hierarchy and the destruction of nature’.152 As a cogent theoretical body and social movement it has matured over the last two decades to be a culminating point for feminism itself, said to represent the meeting of the heart with the head.153 This practical and conceptually holistic revisioning incites inclusive and respectful attentiveness to those other ‘voices’, which until now had been ‘muted through subjugation’: By making visible the interconnections among the dominations of women and nature, ecofeminism shows that both are feminist issues and that explicit acknowledgment of both is vital to any responsible environmental ethic. Feminism must embrace ecological feminism if it is to end the domination of women because the domination of women is tied conceptually and historically to the domination of nature.154

Ecological relations: the case of women 121 Vandana Shiva may be termed an ecofeminist: in drawing upon Indic cosmology, she retrieves the cognitive and ethical epistemology where nature is Prakriti, a living force that dialectically reconnects feminine principles with masculine principles creating theoretically ‘duality in unity’ from the ontology that is the world.155 As such, despite criticisms of generalisation from a culturally specific location,156 she conceptually retrieves the objectified status of women living at the subsistence level in India 157 and promotes a revisioning that may hold value as praxis for these women as subjects without simultaneously forgetting the structural, gendered relationships of the global economy that exist at personal and local levels. The stories of the materialistic perspectives of women whose lives are determined by the social and ecological systems of their environment are political, revealing themselves as bases for further empowerment. Shiva and Maria Mies write that as feminists actively seeking women’s liberation from male domination, we could not . . . ignore the fact that ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ processes and ‘progress’ were responsible for the degradation of the natural world. We saw that the impact on women of ecological deterioration was harder than on men, and also, that everywhere, women were the first to protest against environmental destruction. As activists in the ecology movements, it became clear to us that science and technology were not gender neutral; and in common with many other women, we began to see that the relationship of exploitative dominance between man and nature, and the exploitative and oppressive relationship between men and women that prevails in most patriarchal societies, even modern industrial ones, were closely connected.158 Indeed the specification of female subjects whose lives are so intimately entwined with their environment slips, theoretically, into the danger of essentialism. However, Mies and Shiva, in recognising gender difference as a socially constructed, alienating and oppressive practice, and thereby revealing the work involved in the fallacy of gender neutrality and the harshly unfair experiences of women, particularly in Third World conditions, are able to politicise difference, in a non-discriminatory manner, whilst also problematising the notions of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’, without losing sight of the finite subject. The sovereignty of the ultimate subject, however, should not be equated with a fixed identity. Sovereignty effectively ascribes ontological coherence. Ecofeminism is a conceptual base from which subjects may reconstruct epistemologies; subjects who had previously been denied autonomous integrity. Actual, conceptual, metaphorical and epistemological repressive exploitation is deconstructed to clear space for the realisation of ontological diversity, which is the composite of the varied experiences of women within differing socio-economic and ecological contexts. Consequently essentialism

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is paradigmatically impossible. On the contrary, relativism is fundamental to give credence to the multitudinous identities. Thus, it demonstrates antipathy towards totalising metanarratives that subsume different lives. Instead, ecofeminism is a discourse arising from practical contingency;159 practice and constitution are seen to interact interdependently with theories and values and, consequently, any preconceived break between theory and practice is breached:160 It is essentially monistic, that is, there is no separation between values and action in a theory that reflects the diversity and complexity of both feminist and ecological perspectives and their dynamic interactions. Nevertheless, a certain degree of generalisation according to gender is undeniable; the incontrovertible fact remains that poor women, whatever their geographical locality, whether in the Third World or the First, frequently find themselves at ‘the cutting edge of resistance to ecological destruction’ on the basis of their material proximity to the nonhuman environment, as the quotation from Mies and Shiva above affirmed.161 This, however, is not necessarily a reason for despair: Despite their level of oppression, rural women still maintain real and potential sources of power, which they can use against men. The sources of women’s power, and the forms in which they are manifested change with ecological conditions. And these conditions in turn, change depending on the level of and forms of women’s power. Ecological crises provide not only the pretext and context for struggles by women redefining their identities but also much of their content of these struggles.162 On the basis of the structural legitimation of violence and exploitation of women, as conscious subjects, women have no interest in perpetuating a system based on discriminate injustice.163 Even from positions of individual and ecological exhaustion, women are uniting to collectively address their concerns and fight against ecological destruction and social oppression. Examples abound illustrating the conscious mobilisation of resilient women for an ecological concern that has direct consequences upon their material and spiritual well-being and its ensuing social repercussions. For, in standing up politically, women are, despite their marginalisation, individually and collectively, resisting patriarchally-normalised ideas of their status, and redefining their social and physical environment. The realisation of their potential power and abilities has resulted in their refusal to be part of the background and their demand to share an active role in decision-making processes. Such changes are radicalising many Third World communities:164 Too often, the marginalised are considered powerless, faceless, invisible and second class, especially when they happen to be women. We feel that women and the disenfranchised are none of these, that, indeed the periphery matters, and that change is possible.165


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In fact, globally, there are more than two hundred ‘success stories’ of community-based environmental projects organised by women.166 The most populised programme – mythed as original forerunner – was the Chipko movement. This was initiated by women hugging trees and thereby physically resisting the commercial logging of the Himalayas. It has since become part of popular folklore and, in the process, sanitised of its social subversiveness; the courageous women who participated have been relegated to background invisibility once again.167 But, it was ‘[p]easant women [who] came out, openly challenging the reductionist commercial forestry system on the one hand and the local men who had been colonised by that system, cognitively, economically, and politically, on the other’.168 The Chipko women recognised the forests’ role in maintaining the ecological and climatic equilibrium of the regions and as the source of food, medicines and fuel for the local communities, gathered by themselves. They recognised that the destruction of the forests quite clearly abetted the erosive decimation of local communities. For the forests’ survival was a matter of codependency for the local communities in which women played the primary roles for continued sustainability. The inundation of a number of valley villages, with devastating loss of life and the swamping of fertile lands, by soil running off denuded mountain slopes, spurred the women to mobilise. This mobilisation was grounded in a history of resistance to the violence and destitution served upon women by the ‘masculinist morality of the market’ which had created a cash economy that had led directly to alarming levels of alcohol dependency among the men. Similarly, on the African continent, since it is rural women who bear the brunt of the cumulative effects of poverty and environmental destruction, they are enthusiastically receptive to, for example, reforestation schemes such as that of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement. Started in 1977 by biologist Wangari Maathai, this is an enterprise that arose from the need to address the diminishing supplies of fuel wood in rural Kenya, by establishing tree nurseries and distributing seedlings. It provides income and autonomy for women, thereby rekindling the women’s broad knowledge of indigenous trees and stimulating wider environmental consciousness, providing momentum for transference beyond Kenya. The programme promotes not only a sustainable agricultural ecosystem but also bolsters the knowledge and self-confidence of the participants.169 Elsewhere women continue to struggle to be heard, to be acknowledged as experts in their field; Campbell tells the story of the women rubber tappers’ struggle to have their labour and status in the community respected. This is a very gradual process as male resistance is chipped away. So, although as one woman observed, ‘the seringueiro got free of the boss man, but the muhler seringueiro didn’t get free from her boss – her husband’, this remark reflects the general trend, where women are ‘slowly gaining a stronger voice [publicly] . . . As extractive producers, agriculturalists, home-makers and community leaders, they are actively engaged in moving their community

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“from protest to production”, a process that will in large part determine the success of the extractive reserves’.170 In Mies’ terms, the women are rebelling against the many levels of colonisation that patriarchy and capitalism have weaved, from the family to the arena of the market economy.171 In Ladakh (northern India) such progression has manifested itself via the establishment of a Women’s Alliance, comprising over 3,000 women from throughout the region. This body has emerged as a subtly powerful force initiating debate and bringing about ecologically and culturally sustainable policies.172 It constitutes a democratic forum, initiated to preserve the cultural and ecological traditions of rural Ladakhi life against the onslaught of Western commercial pressures and is exclusively composed of women because it is recognised that the hub of power for Ladakhi women, that of the household, is the fundamental base of society, and also that women have not so readily dropped Ladakhi traditions, in comparison to their male folk. In Colombia, women farmers have also evaded ‘development’ in comparison to their male peers, for development programmes have been based upon monocultural produce for the market. However, women farmers have continued to cultivate a variety of crops for both their family’s consumption and to sell, ensuring a steady supply of food and income, even if little. In this case the ‘invisibility’ of the women farmers, who were ignored by male development agents in conjunction with their distrust of the glamour of market-led agriculture, ensured the sustenance of their families and communities, which they, themselves, are recognising as a strength. However, as much as ‘[w]omen are gaining spaces, yet many of these spaces are narrowing’.173 Nevertheless, as these few examples have demonstrated, women have retained or wrenched back an extraordinary ability to organize themselves to fight ecological destruction and carry out actions that both improve their lives and make a significant contribution to local community development . . . [These] two battles which must be fought simultaneously: one against the growing ecological degradation that surrounds them and one against traditional power structures that subordinate their needs within the family and within society. Their victory is obtained through organization, by working together, by uniting their voices to demand that both their rights and nature be treated justly. The motivation for their actions is based on the full recognition that without a healthy environment, there is no life.174 Writing from the standpoint of rural Indian women, Shiva presents these women as inherently, ecologically virtuous, essentially idolising their marginalised experiences; finding their non-violent revolutionary promise and power in a naturalness that is logically not exclusive to women. Consider the following:

Ecological relations: the case of women 125 illiterate women of the hill villages did not need professional forest hydrologists to tell them of the role of forests in protecting the land and water stability of mountain watersheds, they had drunk this knowledge with their mothers’ milk and had it reinforced as they grew with religious myths and folklore.175 If ecological wisdom is passed down from mothers to offspring and reinforced through socially constructed stories, this theoretically collapses the exclusivity of women’s link with ecology, opening it out holistically if the paradigmatic rationale of society permitted. However, at this specific juncture in time, it is the marginalised and dispossessed who are proactive in political movements against ecologically disastrous projects; women, along with tribal minorities and subsistence farmers, constitute an opposing and, increasingly, imposing spectrum of consciousness. Arising from ontological foundations of historicised material poverty and sustained cultural and ecological traditions, these groups show little interest in conforming to a Western and patriarchal construction of humanity. Thus Shiva’s theoretical elision of the lives of women and the feminine characteristics within the ideological construct of nature is not problematic when Cartesian dichotomies are made meaningless. This is demonstrated by Fredérique Apffel-Marglin who recounts the respected and valued re/productive activities of women in a coastal community in Orissa, India. This community provides an example of a contemporary alternative cognitive relationship to the land and to the community, where reproduction is considered productive work and time is given to allow for the sustenance of social relations. Alongside valuing work that ensures the vitality of the land, both realms are recognised as creative activities involving ecologically and culturally contingent cognitive input, and not mindless activities as supposed by Cartesian rationality.176 Observing that the demonstrations of ecofeminist subjectivity are almost exclusive to Third World, it could be said that the hold of modern rationality that arose from a specific historical and cultural juncture in Europe of the Enlightenment era, is the regulating force. In the Westernised world this dynamic strives to maintain an epistemological dualism and corresponding social hierarchy that mediates, at the very least, the autonomy of relations and causes social and ecological injustice and not infrequently, injury. Value that is informed by the transcendent notion of ‘Enlightenment Man’ is less meaningful to these subjects. As such, ‘Third World Women’ are romantically depicted as possessing the capacity to resist colonisation, arising from their ‘privileged position to make visible the invisible oppositional categories that they are the custodians of’.177 Alternately, these ‘new’ subjects may be once again quashed by the universalising logic of insensitive domination of the environment and all naturalised relations for the masters’ instant gratification according to a patriarchal ordering of the world. However, the reintroduction of competing subjects

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with diverse and conflicting epistemologies reveals the play of power between relations upon earth over the allocation of space and distribution of resources.

The power of the subject The purpose of focusing upon women is to illuminate the institutionalised depoliticisation inherent in the dominant political paradigm and our entrance into political praxis as autonomous subjects without the need to subscribe to exclusively patriarchal epistemologies. The discriminatory disposition of IR, as currently theorised and practised, is founded upon a historic-cultural specific, namely, Baconian utilitarianism abetted by Cartesian rationality that presumed a universalised hierarchy. As a result, social injustice is reified, resting upon an exclusive epistemology of the naturalisation of all those peoples and areas considered beyond the remit of this restricted rendering of conscious cognition and ability to be political. This chapter argues for the inclusion of women from pluralistic and diverse contexts, without simultaneously subsuming difference. The final step of genealogical analysis allows us to recognise women as subjects whose integrity is constantly mediated by the prevailing and normalising powers that have excluded us in the past. From this ‘panoramic view’178 it may be seen: ‘Almost exclusively, all polluters and environmental criminals are men; women don’t hold positions of power to make and carry out those decisions’.179 The preceding section demonstrated the analogous relationship between the absence of women in positions of political decision making and the erosion of biological diversity on the basis that women nurture the environment in order to ensure a steady and varied production of foodstuffs.180 However, there is a danger inherent in this approach; by accrediting women with the responsibility for biological diversity men are excused. Theoretically it persists in reifying the patriarchal naturalisation of women as closer to nature, without according political autonomy unless it is the gender-specific responsibility of cleaning up the environment. To critically analyse this gendered bias of power and consequential reversed gendered assumption of who will, ‘invisibly’, actually do the dirty work, it is necessary to ‘demystify the social conception of masculinity as power’.181 Gender investigation illuminates this interplay between economics and politics and the construction of subjects according to those controlling power.182 Unless structural power paradigms are analysed, women will continue to be ‘disadvantaged if they assume environmental responsibility in circumstances of disempowerment’.183 There have been evident improvements in power relationships. Bretherton points out the shift in cognition and language from complete exclusion of women at the 1972 Stockholm conference on the Human Environment to ‘comprehensive inclusion’ of women in the final drafts produced from the 1992 Rio ‘Earth Summit’, due to the success of lobbying by women who had learnt to draw together to form a coherent, proactive voice from the

Ecological relations: the case of women 127 experiences of a plethora of grass-roots Third World and First World groups that came together during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85).184 Thus, they learnt to streamline and cohere their many experiences into one voice to legitimate their demand for authority in the public domain of a world summit. That this required an economisation and sublimation of the plurality of political locations and interests and a large degree of self-objectification does not detract from the fact that this amounted to a major wrenching of political legitimacy and power from men and maledefined agendas. Thus, to adopt bell hooks’ argument that ‘language is also a place of struggle’, this act of women speaking themselves and for themselves from a former position of oppression in the voice of the oppressor, has been a politicisation in and of itself.185 Nevertheless, the widely perceived congruence between ecology and feminism remains problematic; biological and social constructionist readings do not epistemologically raise women from objective status. Whether nature is technologically dominated by (hu)mankind, or women are socio-politically oppressed by men, both remain victims: [T]he very antagonistic forces of oppression, which are said to be preventing, respectively, women’s full identity as women and nature’s full self-realization as nature are one and the same. In this construction of political affinity, the two subjects exist as equivalences, as occupying the same space in relation to the antifeminist, antiecological Other that prevents the full constitution of either autonomous identity.186 Neither nature nor women evade objectification if the processes of nomination are realised epistemologically and ideologically as the Other. This dialecticism dates back to Bacon, who legitimised in secular language the social filtering process of patriarchal power interests. It is also an inevitable outcome of Cartesian rationalisation whereby the subject is identified in opposition to an other/object. Thus, construction of another conceptual space or another discipline will reify the persistence of Cartesian rationality, presupposing dualism and the construction of a less powerful Other: finding the subject . . . is always a project of language, of the symbolic order, of creating images of likeness in the context of a structure that emphasizes certain elements defining similarity. What we may find in our quest is a permanently social product, apprehended through a certain filter defining some elements as representing nature to ourselves, the trace of the impossible subject as a particular subject position.187 What is required is a fundamental revision of the metaphysical foundations and paradigmatic norms to conceptualising and politicising women as empowered subjects; freed from naturalised and powerfully constraining givens. But, so long as women are naturalised, or the environment

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feminised,188 there will remain ‘the need to dominate nature [which] is . . . a projection of the need to dominate other human beings’.189 Perceiving power relations as a ‘need’ illuminates the lack on the part of the dominating subject and posits society as ‘naturally’ divided once again. This has consequences for society: The way a society structures the most fundamental human relations – the relations between the female and male halves of humanity without which our species could not survive – has major implications for the totality of a social system . . . profoundly affect[ing] all our values and social institutions – whether a society will be peaceful or warlike, generally egalitarian or authoritarian, and living in harmony with or bent on the conquest of our environment.190 Dualistic frames need to be negated for they set up divisive practices: competition, domination, repression, etc. ‘Others’ are not only marginalised by contemporary cultural practices, but also negated by the process of defining a singular ‘self’.191 To escape the ‘male gaze’, without displacing feminism’s overt political struggle against subordination, a way is preferred that refutes essentialist claims by perceiving the contingent and constructed ‘locality’ of a woman, whose being is informed by ‘coalitional’ representations.192 So a paradigmatic space is required in order to see ‘fruitfully contradictory and multiple possibilities’ from which to reappraise not only ‘women’ but more generally humanity.193 Ultimately a feminist perspective aids the ability to construct a transformative theory reflective of the rich diversity of natural and ‘natural’ experiences.194 The play between knowledge and power is thereby implicitly included in such critique. For example, the term ‘experience’ may lead to accusations of essentialism since it reproduces the power-knowledge hold of the story-teller, and not necessarily that of the selected ‘subject’; there is a need to interrogate these ‘processes’.195 Instead, discursive analysis, that critiques epistemological forms of knowledge and power interests, may illuminate the context of those speaking from the depths of socio-political oppression. But, in reaching into ‘the peripheries and the depths’, one needs to remain vigilant toward the danger of privileging, ‘romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions’. For these standpoints are not immune to critical inquiry on the basis of their former marginalisation and/or subjugation. Their appearance as ‘more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world’ is recognised as merely another version of seeing, like the omniscient, patriarchal, version. On the other hand, a relativist rendering of these versions would obliterate the differential power positions; in straining to see a position there is ‘always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices’. For, there

Ecological relations: the case of women 129 is no way to ‘be’ simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privileged (subjugated) positions structured by gender, race, nation, class . . . The search for such a ‘full’ and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes appearing in feminist theory as the essentialised Third World Woman. Subjugation is not grounds for ontology; it might be a visual clue. Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning.196 Being able to see enables a position. The power-knowledge nexus mediates the epistemological stance, dismissing ontological context. Such positioning requires political and ethical responsibility for the selection of epistemology, that is, of what counts as rational has practical consequences. Instead, theorisation needs to emanate from ‘situated and embodied knowledges and against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims’.197 Apffel-Marglin in describing (and prescribing) social and ecological relationships built upon ‘enactive cognition’ disputes Haraway’s hope that technological developments may implode gendered constructions of nature and culture, seeing genetic engineering and reproductive technologies as examples of ‘the reach of instrumental Cartesian rationality into ever fresh portions of the world’.198 But, ultimately both authors demonstrate attempts to clear theoretical, conceptual and practical space from the rubble of patriarchally constructed rationality and institutions that have persisted in the oppression and denigration of women as creative subjects able to lead consciously deliberated and potentially meaningful lives. It amounts to both a theoretical and practical struggle to overcome a powerfully reinforced stasis. This was the fundamental promise of Foucault’s politicisation of power relations – to insist upon re-examining the ethical, metaphysical and personal bases of political praxis and effect liberatory change. This holds the power to turn the tide of ultimate self-destruction – for all relations, individually and as a community, are caught within the interconnected web of the life of the whole ecosystem – and require living with integrity; that is, social, spiritual and ecological, contextualised integrity.199 Theoretically, ontology is repaired to epistemology; in practice, humanity is emancipated from a political rationality that insisted that we were ‘detached, ideal observers’ to reflect our organic social relations with the ecological fabric of life.200 Although women remain human subjects of discursive procedures, insofar as all relations constitute and abet political meanings and constructions, awareness of power relations is a significant step towards dispersal of power and its usurpation according to differing patterns; an opening is created for women to assert their autonomy as political subjects: the ontological and political marginalisation of women based upon reductionist, epistemological ideologies is discursively reprocessed. The existence, identities, and interests of women are freed from homogeneous objectification to allow for polymorphous bases for interdependent subjectivity without losing the identity of the subject in any ‘postmodern acid bath’.201 Thus we

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have moved, conceptually and actually, with self-determination from a position of lumpen entrapment to one of self-conscious enmeshment in the pervasive power relations of global society. Use of the vehicle of ecofeminism is significant, for its inherent ‘transformative’ ‘power and promise’202 is as a political discourse that deconstructively opens the issue of women’s connectedness with the environment and has implications for humanity as a whole: address[ing] not only the interlinked dynamics in patriarchal culture of the terror of nature and the terror of the elemental power of the female but also the ways out of the mesmerizing conditioning that keeps women and men so cut off from our grounding in the natural world, so alienated from our larger sense of self in the unfolding story of the universe.203 The following chapter continues this theme focusing upon species, rather than gender, as the discriminating factor limiting epistemological understanding and hence a reductionist politicisation of the constituent ecological relations of this earth. As we shall see, gender and the notion of species are regarded as mutually compounding forces of discrimination.

Notes 1 Connolly, W. E. (1993) ‘Voices from the Whirlwind’, in Bennett, J. and Chaloupka, W. (eds) In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics and the Environment, London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 222. 2 Zalewski, M. (1998) ‘Where is Woman in International Relations? “To Return as a Woman and be Heard” ’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (4), 847–867. 3 Daly, M. (1979) Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London: The Women’s Press Ltd., pp. 18–19 and p. 326 for a description of the genesis and evolution of the female pronoun, ‘she,’ which is silenced when humanity is uncritically regarded as generically male. 4 Conley, V. A. (1997) Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought, London and New York: Routledge. 5 Bretherton, C. (1988) ‘Global environmental politics: putting gender on the agenda?’, Review of International Studies, 24, 85–100, p. 86. 6 Bretherton, C. (1996) ‘Gender and Environmental Change: Are Women the Key to Safeguarding the Planet?’, in Vogler, J. and Imber, M. F. (eds) The Environment and International Relations, London: Routledge. 7 Despite 29 years of The Equal Pay Act, women still earn only 79 pence for every £1 a man earns for doing the same job in the UK; Viner K. (1999, 24 February) ‘Learning to Love our Cellulite’, The Guardian (G2), p. 4. 8 Buck, L., Gallant, N. and Nossal K. R. (1998) ‘Sanctions as a gendered instrument of statecraft: the case of Iraq’, Review of International Studies, 24, 69–84. 9 Butler, J. (1992) ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” ’, in Butler, J. and Scott, J. W. (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge, pp. 15–16. 10 Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, London: UCL Press, p. 66.

Ecological relations: the case of women 131 11 Joan Griscom quoted in Eckersley, (1992) p. 67. See also Mellor, M. (1992) ‘Green Politics: Ecofeminist, Ecofeminine or Ecomasculine?’, Environmental Politics, 1 (2), 229–251. 12 This is the standpoint of Simone de Beauvoir, who finds human creativity only in transcendence of nature and embodied, ‘naturally’ only in men; women are the ‘second sex’ and as such need to struggle up to reach equality with men: de Beauvoir, S. (Parshley, H. M., trans. and ed.) (1988, first published in 1949) The Second Sex, London: Picador. 13 Henderson, H. (1983) ‘The Warp and the Weft: The Coming Synthesis of EcoPhilosophy and Eco-Feminism’, in Caldecott, L. and Leland, S. (eds) Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak out for Life on Earth, London: The Women’s Press Ltd., p. 207. 14 Vidal, J. (1993 August 9) ‘And the Eco-Feminists shall inherit the Earth’, The Guardian (G2), p. 10. 15 Grimshaw specifically addresses the discipline of philosophy, however I believe this insight can be applied more widely. Grimshaw, J. (1986) Feminist Philosophers: Women’s Perspectives on Philosophical Traditions, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 16 Of the many publications explaining ecofeminism the following are representative: Mies, M. and V. Shiva (1993) Ecofeminism, London: Zed Books; Warren, K. (ed.) (1994) Ecological Feminism, London: Routledge. 17 Birkeland, J. (1993) ‘Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice’, in Gaard, G. (ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 17–18. 18 Plumwood, V. (1993a) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. 19 New, C. (1996) ‘Man Bad, Woman Good? Essentialisms and Ecofeminisms’, New Left Review, 216, 79–93. 20 Peterson, V. S. and Runyan, A. S. (1993) Global Gender Issues, Oxford: Westview Press, p. 165. 21 Plumwood (1993a) pp. 3–10 and 195, respectively. Also Plumwood, V. (1993b) ‘Feminism and Ecofeminism: Beyond the Dualistic Assumptions of Women, Men and Nature’, Society and Nature, 2 (1), 36–51. 22 Tickner, J. A. (1992) Gender in International Relations, Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, New York and Oxford: Colombia University Press, p. 59. 23 Marglin, S. A. (1990) ‘Towards the Decolonization of the Mind’, in ApffelMarglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 24 Rao, B. (1989) ‘Struggling for Production Conditions and Producing Conditions for Emancipation: Women and Water in Rural Maharashtra’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 2, 65–82, p. 65. 25 King, Y. (1983) ‘The Eco-feminist Imperative’, in Caldecott, L. and Leland, S. (eds) Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak out for Life on Earth, London: The Women’s Press, p. 11. 26 Cf. Enloe, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: University of California Press, Ltd. 27 The Ecologist (1993) Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., p. 107. 28 For examples of ‘family-planning’ policies see The Ecologist, (1993) pp. 140–151, and Bretherton, (1996) p. 102. 29 Quoted in The Ecologist, (1993) p. 141. 30 The Ecologist, (1993). 31 Christa Wichterich quoted in The Ecologist, (1993) p. 150. 32 The Ecologist, (1993) pp. 141–142. 33 Seager, J. (1997, 2nd ed.) The State of Women in the World Atlas, London: Penguin.

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34 Neale terms this reductionistic revisioning of woman with the term wom(b)an: Neale, P. (1998) ‘The bodies of Christ as international bodies: the Holy See, wom(b)an and the Cairo Conference’, Review of International Studies, 24, 101–118. 35 Wichterich quoted in The Ecologist, (1993) p. 38. 36 Mies, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books, p. 45. 37 Discussion of Lorna Duffin’s ‘The Conspicuous Consumptive: Woman as an Invalid’, in Nandy, A. and Visvanathan, S. (1990) ‘Modern Medicine and its Non-Modern Critics: A Study in Discourse’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. (eds) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 157. 38 Apffel-Marglin, F. (1996b) ‘Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production to Regeneration’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 151–152. 39 Shiva, V. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books, pp. 118–120. 40 Daly, (1979) 41 Mies, (1986) 42 Shiva, V. (1992a) ‘The Seed and the Earth: Women, Ecology and Biotechnology’, The Ecologist 22 (1), 4–7. 43 For example, powerful societal pressures exist in the West to discipline women, to monitor their diet, physical activities, etc. 44 Kirk, G. (1995) ‘Women Resist Ecological Destruction’, in Ashworth, G. (ed.) A Diplomacy of the Oppressed: New Directions in International Feminism, London: Zed Books; Lehtinen, U. (1997) ‘Environmental Racism: The US Nuclear Industry and Native Americans’, The Ecologist, 27 (2), pp. 43–44. 45 Eckersley, (1992) p. 66. 46 Persram, N. (1994) ‘Politicizing the Féminine, Globalizing the Feminist’, Alternatives, 19, 275–313. 47 Mies, (1986) p. 54. 48 Seager, (1997). 49 Plumwood, V. (1994) ‘Conversations with Gaia’, in Jaggar, A. M. (ed.) Living with Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist Social Ethics, Oxford: Westview Press, p. 667. 50 Haraway, D. J. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge. 51 Chow, R. (1992) ‘Postmodern Automatons’, in Butler, J. and J. W. Scott, (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. 52 Wollstonecraft, M. (1992, first published in 1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London: Penguin Books; Mill, J. S. (1970) (first published in 1869) The Subjection of Women, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 53 The Ecologist, (1993) p. 38. 54 Porritt, J. (1984) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 55 Jackson, C. (1995) ‘Radical Environmental Myths: A Gender Perspective’, New Left Review, 210, 124–140, p. 140. 56 Haraway, (1989) pp. 280 and 149, respectively. 57 Salleh, A. (1992) ‘The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal Reason’, Environmental Ethics, (1992) 14, 195–216, p. 211. 58 The most popular expression of this is James Lovelock’s Gaia: Lovelock, J. E. (1979) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 59 Merchant, C. (1982) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, London: Wildwood House Ltd.

Ecological relations: the case of women 133 60 Cited by Jackson, C. (1994) ‘Gender Analysis and Environmentalisms’, in Redclift, M. and Benton, T. (eds) Social Theory and the Global Environment, London: Routledge, p. 126. 61 Connolly, (1993). 62 Plumwood, (1994), p. 668. 63 Adams, C. J. (1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. 64 Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, London: Harvard University Press. 65 hooks, b. (1991) ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround, p. 152. 66 Bourdieu, P. (Adamson, M., trans.) (1990) ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 13 and 18. 67 Wittgenstein, L. (Anscombe, G. E. M. and Von Wright, G. H., eds; Paul, D. and Anscombe, G. E. M., trans.) (1974) On Certainty, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 68 Elshtain, J. B. (1981) Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 69 Elshtain, (1981) pp. 104 and 333, respectively. 70 Griffin, S. (1978) ‘Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her’, in Humm, M. (ed.) (1992) Feminisms: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 76–77. 71 Russell, J. S. (1990) ‘The Evolution of an Ecofeminist’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, p. 225. 72 Examples include Cheney, J. (1987) ‘Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology’, Environmental Ethics, 9, 115–145; Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) (1990) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books; Gaard, G. (ed.) (1993) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Gray, E. D. (1981) (2nd ed.) Green Paradise Lost, Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press; Kheel, M. (1985) ‘The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair’, Environmental Ethics, 7, 135–149; Mellor, (1992); Plumwood, V. (1993a); Reuther, R. R. (1975) New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, New York: The Seabury Press; Salleh, A. (1984) ‘Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Ecofeminist Connection’, Environmental Ethics, 6, 339–345; Salleh, (1992); Salleh, A. (1993) ‘Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate’, Environmental Ethics, 15, 225–244; Seager, J. (1993) Earth Follies: Feminism, Politics and the Environment, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.; Shiva, (1989); Mies and Shiva (1993); Warren, (1994). 73 Biehl, J. (1993) ‘Problems in Ecofeminism’, Society and Nature, 2 (1), 52–71, p. 53. 74 Plumwood, (1993b) p. 38. 75 Jackson, (1994) p. 113. 76 See the debate spurred by Jackson, (1995) in the New Left Review, and corresponding replies: Mellor, M. (1996) ‘Myths and Realities: A Reply to Cecile Jackson’, New Left Review, 217, 132–137; Salleh, A. (1996) ‘An Ecofeminist BioEthic and What Post-Humanism Really Means’, New Left Review, 217, 138–147; Jackson, C. (1996) ‘Still Stirred by the Promise of Modernity’, New Left Review, 217, 148–154. 77 Seager, (1993) p. 282. 78 Enloe, (1989). 79 Cited by Griffin, S. (1981) Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature, London: Women’s Press, p. 24. 80 Youngs, G. (1996) ‘Beyond the “Inside/Outside” Divide’, in Krause, J. and Renwick, N. (eds) Identities in International Relations, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

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81 Shiva, (1989). 82 Shiva, (1989); Sontheimer, S. (ed.) (c. 1991) Women and the Environment: A Reader; Crisis and Development in the Third World, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. 83 Seager, (1997). 84 Anand, A. (1992) ‘Introduction’ to The Power to Change; Women in the Third World Redefine their Environment, A Report by the Women’s Feature Service, London: Zed Books Ltd.; Kirk, (1995); Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Chichester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press. 85 Cf. Norberg-Hodge, H. (1991) Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, London: Rider. 86 Shiva, (1989). 87 Shiva, (1989). 88 Term used by Shiva, (1989) and also Escobar, (1995) ch. 5. 89 Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the non-Human, Oxford: Blackwell. 90 Shiva, (1989) p. 118. 91 Rao, (1989) p. 66. 92 Shiva, (1989); Shiva V., and Third World Network, (1993) Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, London: Zed Books. 93 Exceptions to this generalisation are the micro-credit lending agencies that lend almost exclusively to women, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the Self-employed Women’s Association Co-operative Bank in India and the Associacion Dominicana para el Desarrollo de la Mujer in the Dominican Republic which lend, on average, sums of US$ 300: Seager, (1997) p. 79. Indeed, such schemes operate in 52 countries throughout the world, including the USA and a pilot scheme in East London; BBC Radio 4 (1999, 12 May) the ‘You and Yours’ programme. This not only suggests that a counter-movement is possible and under way, but also illuminates the similar experiences of poverty and marginalisation shared by women cross-culturally and world-wide. 94 Seager, (1997) p. 81. 95 Shiva, (1992a) pp. 4–5. 96 Haraway, D. J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_Oncomouse_: Feminism and Technoscience, London: Routledge, p. 174. 97 Cf. Mies, (1986). 98 Haraway, (1989) p. 290. 99 de Beauvior, (1988) p. 175. 100 Haraway, (1989) p. 332. 101 Mies, (1986) pp. 58–71. 102 Mies, (1986). 103 Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, p. 9; Fox Keller, E. (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 104 Plumwood, (1994) p. 667. 105 Merchant, (1982). 106 Merchant, (1982) p. 2. 107 Merchant, (1982) p. 169. 108 Bacon inspired the establishment of the Royal Society and progressively rose in public status under the patronage of James 1. 109 Bacon, F. (Robertson, J. M., ed. and introdn.; translated and reprinted from Ellis and Spedding) (1905) ‘De Augmentis Scientarium’, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., p. 428. 110 Merchant, (1982) p. 172. 111 Fox Keller, (1985) p. 34.

Ecological relations: the case of women 135 112 113 114 115

Wichterich, quoted in The Ecologist, (1993) p. 109. Merchant, (1982) p. 193. Fox Keller, (1985) p. 37. Machiavelli, N. (1992, first published 1513) The Prince, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., pp. 66–68. 116 Mies, (1986) p. 83. 117 The Ecologist, (1993). 118 Enloe, (1989). 119 Daly, (1979) p. 315. 120 Merchant, (1982) p. 163. 121 Apffel-Marglin, (1996b) pp. 152–153. 122 Haraway, (1989) p. 288. 123 Enloe, (1989) p. 196. 124 Adele Mueller quoted by Escobar, (1995) p. 180. 125 Cf. Shiva, (1989); Shiva, V. (1991) The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, London: Zed Books; Shiva and Third World Network, (1993); Mies and Shiva, (1993). 126 Shiva, (1989); Shiva, V. (1998) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Totnes, Devon: Green Books in association with The Gaia Foundation. 127 Escobar, (1995) p. 5. 128 Shiva, (1989) pp. 219–220. 129 Escobar, (1995). 130 Mies, (1986). 131 Shiva, (1989) p. 113. 132 Daly, (1979) pp. 2, 39 and 59, respectively. 133 Baeza, P. (1991) ‘Uprooting – Displacing – Resisting – The economic doublebind’, in Sontheimer, S. (ed.) Women and the Environment: A Reader; Crisis and Development in the Third World, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. 134 See Part 4 of Mies and Shiva, (1993). 135 Mies, in Mies and Shiva, (1993) p. 156. 136 Of the many personal accounts of silencing, discrimination and attack experienced by women who speak up against the patriarchal and ecologically insensitive status quo are the indictments of academic laxity levelled against feminist scholars by Jones, A. (1996) ‘Does “gender” make the world go round? Feminist critiques of international relations’, Review of International Relations, 22 (4), 405–429; and accusations by the Indian government that Helena Norberg-Hodge was a CIA agent actively undermining security in Ladakh, Norberg-Hodge, (1991). 137 Such as Jackson, (1995); and Zimmerman, M. E. (1987) ‘Deep Ecology from the Perspective of Ecological Science’, Environmental Ethics, 9, 21–44. 138 Cf. Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 309. 139 Te Awekotuku, N. (1983) ‘He Wahine, He Whenua: Maori women and the environment’, in Caldecott, L. and Leland, S. (eds) Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, London: The Women’s Press Ltd., p. 139. 140 Plumwood, (1993b) p. 41. 141 Cf. Plumwood, (1993a). 142 Biehl, (1993) pp. 55–61. 143 Chow, (1992). 144 Plant, J. (1990) ‘Searching for Common Ground: Ecofeminism and Bioregionalism’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books; p. 157. 145 d’ Eaubonne, F. (1984) Le Feminisme ou la Mort, Paris: Pierre Horay. 146 Salleh, (1992) p. 215. 147 Daly, (1979) pp. 9–11.

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148 Plumwood, (1993b) p. 47. 149 King, Y. (1990) ‘Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology and the Nature/ Culture Dualism’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) (1990) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 150 Salleh, (1992) p. 198. 151 Henderson, (1983) p. 207. 152 Plumwood, (1993b) pp. 48–49. 153 Birkeland, (1993) pp. 17–18. 154 Warren, K. J. (1990) ‘The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism’, Environmental Ethics, 12 (2), 125–146, p. 143. 155 Shiva, (1989) pp. 38–42. 156 Jackson, (1995). 157 The publication of Mies and Shiva, (1993) is informed explicitly by the ‘subsistence perspective’, p. 20. 158 Mies and Shiva, (1993) pp. 2–3. 159 Green, K. (1994) ‘Freud, Wollstonecraft, and Ecofeminism: A Defense of Liberal Feminism’, Environmental Ethics, 16 (2), 117–134. 160 King, (1983). 161 Kirk, (1995) p. 70. 162 Rao, (1989) p. 82. 163 Mies, (1986). 164 The Women’s Feature Service (1992) The Power to Change: Women in the Third World Redefine their Environment, London: Zed Books; Sontheimer, (1991). 165 Anand, (1992) p. 21. 166 Seager, (1993) p. 280. 167 Jain, S. (1991) ‘Standing up for Trees: Women’s role in the Chipko Movement’, in Sontheimer, S. (ed.) Women and the Environment: A Reader; Crisis and Development in the Third World, London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.; Shiva, (1989) pp. 67–77; Guha, R. (1991) The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 168 Shiva, (1989) p. 77. 169 See Jones, M. and Wangari Maathai, (1983) ‘Greening the Desert: Women of Kenya reclaim land’, in Caldecott, L. and Leland, S. (eds) Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, London: The Women’s Press Ltd. Also discussed by Bretherton, (1996) and Kirk, (1995). 170 Campbell, C. E., in collaboration with The Women’s Group of Xapuri, Acre, Brazil, (1992) ‘On the Front Lines, But Struggling For Voice: Women in the Rubber Tappers’ Defence of the Amazon Forest’, The Ecologist, 27 (2), 46–54, p. 54. 171 Mies, (1986). 172 One notable example is the successful ban on polythene in Ladakh, which had started to adversely affect the environment (blocking the waterways, etc.) and health of the animals. This is now being considered on a national scale. 173 Escobar, (1995) p. 186. 174 Sontheimer, (1991) no page number. 175 Shiva, V. (1986) ‘Ecology Movements in India’, Alternatives XI, 255–273, p. 260. 176 Apffel-Marglin, (1996b). 177 Shiva, (1989) p. 46. 178 Mies, (1986) p. 210. 179 Patricia Hynes, a past official of the US Environmental Protection Agency, quoted by Bretherton, (1996) p. 105. 180 Shiva, V. (1996) ‘The loser’s perspective’, in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M. (eds) The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People, Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd, for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid.

Ecological relations: the case of women 137 181 Birkeland, (1993) p. 53. 182 Peterson, V. S. and Runyan, A. S. (1993) Global Gender Issues, Oxford: Westview Press. 183 Bretherton, (1996) p. 114. 184 Bretherton, (1996) and Bretherton, (1998). 185 hooks, (1991). 186 Sandilands, C. (1995) ‘From Natural Identity to Radical Democracy’, Environmental Ethics, 17(1), 75–91, p. 84. 187 Sandilands, (1995) p. 85. 188 Soper, (1995). 189 Fox Keller, (1985) p. 124. 190 Eisler, R. (1990) ‘The Gaia Tradition and the Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) (1990) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, p. 26. 191 Gruen, L. (1993) ‘Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals’, in Gaard, G. (ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, p. 80. 192 Chow, (1992). 193 Haraway, (1989) pp. 286–287. 194 Warren, K. J. (1987) ‘Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections’, Environmental Ethics 9 (1) 3–20. 195 Scott, J. W. (1992) ‘Experience’, in Butler, J. and Scott, J. W. (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge, p. 38. 196 Haraway, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, pp. 191–193. 197 Haraway, (1991), p. 191. 198 Apffel-Marglin, (1996b) pp. 158–159. 199 Starhawk, (1990) ‘Power, authority, and mystery: Ecofeminism and earth-based spirituality’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 200 Cheney, (1987). 201 Jackson, (1995) p. 139. 202 Warren, (1987) and Warren, (1990). 203 Spretnak, C. (1990) ‘Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, p. 6.

5

Ecological relations The case of nonhuman animals

The primate body, as part of the body of nature, may be read as a map of power.1

Nonhuman animals have been conceptually conceived as subjugated ‘others’ in the dominant paradigm that epistemologically frames life dualistically as nature or culture/politics. (Thus they share the same experience as women.) However, the world human animals inhabit is shared with nonhuman animals; the finite space of earth and fragile flora is our common base. ‘Man’, historically conceived as the generic term for (Western) human beings, has attempted philosophically and laboriously to distance himself from this ecological context and deny the fact that fundamentally we too, physiologically, are animals. In distanciating and blurring this ontology, politics is epistemologically constructed to reflect this ‘transcendent’ perception. A focus upon nonhuman animals allows us to see this metaphysical move. A culture of political rationality has been normatively constructed based upon an epistemology of human dominion. Ontological interdependent relations have conceptually and metaphorically been denied. Strangely, modern politics is conventionally theorised from a methodological assumption of positivism that regards the world objectively as universally knowable and instrumental. Yet, ecologically, this chasm between ontological and epistemological premises for conceptualising politics is proven daily; environmental disturbances and the steady depletion of knowledges, species and ecosystems are evident. It is argued here that there is a need to correlate epistemology with ontology for a more sound and just social and ecological politics to emerge. There has been a significant transition in our actual relationship with ‘others’ in the past;2 the political challenge is to recognise the movement once again and respond in a contingently sensitive manner. Ethical considerations can inform political theories and norms differently when the ontological recognition that ‘[w]e are not just rather like animals; we are animals’ is brought to the fore of epistemological conceptualisation. This truism reminds us that although there may be differences, ‘comparisons [with animals] have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves’.3


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Indeed the discourses constructed to distinguish nonhuman from human are the original axis of political thinking; thus humanoid animals, such as primates, as the opening quotation affirms, constitute ‘wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms’.4 In practice, animals are often perceived through ‘ignorance and fear’.5 This separation constructed upon incomprehension is reinforced by the exclusive human ability to define. Thus the pervasive image of animals is filtered through a one-way lens that constructs their being according to our whims.6 Articulation of this way of perceiving nonhuman animals further objectifies animate beings as things; consider what pronoun is normally employed when referring to a nonhuman: it. The argument that advocating the case for nonhuman animals inherently reinforces the objectification of nonhuman animals needs to be seen in the light of defence on behalf of the socially vulnerable, which is regarded as entirely reasonable in contemporary society. It has also been argued that the politics of ecology is ‘a species of humanism’ because it is per se an academic concept derivative and informative of the cultural realm. Thus the pre-eminence of humans is left undisturbed, in no way conceding an equivalence of consideration and certainly not a shared role in the political arena to nonhumans.7 However, this position implicitly accepts a division between culture, the realm of politicisation, and nature, the cognitively vacant domain where nonhumans reside. It also implies anthropocentrism, that is, the exclusive privileging of the perspective and location of anthropoids (human beings), which is the assumed norm in political discussion. It is defended upon the premise that only human animals have the capacity to reason and articulate choices as moral beings. To exclude, conceptually and theoretically, animals from political discourse is to make possible, although not logically determine, the perpetuation of the lie that human animals are an independent species, who may continue to use, abuse and amuse themselves with all ‘lesser’ animals. Nonhuman animals are conceived as having no inherent worth other than as empty vessels awaiting meaning according to human determination. From an ecological perspective, this is fallacious, despite the entrenched metaphysical barrier between humans and nonhumans in Western culture. Whether metaphorical or actual, discrimination and violence against animals will impact upon human beings, for we are all ecological relations. Since human understanding in political theory is dismissive of ecological context, it could be said to be ontologically groundless. Accordingly, an anthropocentric perspective amounts to a delusory foundation. Warwick Fox calls this ‘a dangerous orientation towards the world’.8 For, as the epistemological base of political theory and activity, anthropocentrism may legitimise structural oppression and violence. A focus upon this anthropocentrism reveals the human-centredness of the perspective. Critics of non-anthropocentrism, that is, supporters of the status quo, at times, conflate ecocentrism with misanthropy, that is, opposition to humans. However, ecocentrism is a celebration of human existence too. Moreover, being a human is

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not tautologically conflatable with implicit anthropocentrism. For human identity need not equal human chauvinism or imperialism for five reasons. First, since we do not exist exclusively at the hub of the universe, but are biologically related to other creatures, we are not, in fact, ‘psychologically, socially, or culturally different in kind from all other animals and . . . are not the “end point” of evolution’; there is a natural continuum between animals and humans; human culture erected an artificial dividing barrier. ‘We are animals’. Second, ‘our anthropocentric attitudes have proved disastrous in practice’. Not animals but humans have produced irreversible ecological consequences that have resulted in the rapid decline of the global ecosystem’s natural rich diversity. Third, anthropocentrism is ‘not even logically consistent’. Following on from the first two suppositions, rationally the superiority accorded to humans is untenable, even ‘morally objectionable’. Finally it ‘does not accord with a genuinely open approach to experience’.9 An attempt to theorise an inclusive politicisation of ecological relations responds to these criticisms of anthropocentrism and are at the fore of attention within this chapter. To epistemologically reframe political understandings of relations is to acknowledge, holistically, the subjects resident upon earth and their different contexts, experiences and knowledges and requires struggling against the institutionalised and individualised triangular nexus of power, in which such a singular conception excluding the diversity of life is constantly reified through mythological signification. But, as Roland Barthes reminds us, myth ‘hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear’.10 Or, as Claude Lévi-Strauss posits: ‘[m]ythic thought only accepts nature on condition that it is able to reproduce it’.11 In sum, the political realm is a compressed distortion of the whole social and ecological context. The myths of human transcendence from or hierarchical dominion over other animals may be accepted politically but remain expressions of oppression and constitute institutional arenas injurious to international relations. As Chapter 1 delineated, political philosophy as the foundation to IR theorisation is rooted in an axiomatic dualism of humanity versus nature, whereby naturalised beings are normalised to be beyond political cognition. In other words, speciesism, a term coined by the philosopher and animal liberationist, Peter Singer, is implicit in politics. The core of the discussion of this chapter is the evolutionary ethical and political recognition and possible demise of this conceptual given, that is, the renunciation of ‘prejudice or an attitude of bias toward the interests of members of ones own species’, analogous to racism or sexism.12 Breaking free of this modern tale of progress, built on social transcendence from natural immanence via constructed forms of specious exclusivity, is necessitated to evade social and ecological destruction.13 If not, humanity will be left floundering, ethically. For there also exists in contemporary politics a fundamental disjuncture between the expansive ambitions of philosophical discussion on the moral status of animals and the stultifying, static nature of politics to address these metaphysical attempts to dispense with the artificiality of political boundaries.


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As in the preceding chapter my aim is to explore the development of the subject of nonhuman animals according to the same Foucauldian methodology. This thereby reveals the objectified status of animals and the epistemological practices that reify this subservient location. Unlikely as it may seem to those of us schooled in anthropocentric law, animals are rediscovered as subjects. Nevertheless, the pervasive power relations of human society do not conceptually loosen their grip to include nonhumans as our relations. Human interests persist, articulated and rationalised through a fantastically, self-obsessed reverie, to paraphrase Iris Murdoch,14 and thus the inescapable egoism of humanity means that our nonhuman relations lose out in the struggle to retain power for humanity alone. Foucault’s first ‘mode of inquiry’ focuses on ‘the objectivizing of the speaking subject’. Immediately it appears as if Foucault is anthropocentric. However, the adjective ‘speaking’ may be interpreted in terms broader than solely human limits. A liberal interpretation of Foucault’s words may be justified by his frank antipathy towards ‘concrete’, ‘abstract and limiting’ ‘totalization’. He had always attempted to ‘open up’ agendas and ‘cut across societies on the diagonal’ and therefore it would seem not inconsistent to apply a ‘perverse’ subject that would liberate the political discourse.15 It has been argued that Foucault evades the limits of humanism through constant critique of contemporary subjects and their constitutive contingent environment.16 Correspondingly, it is argued here that Foucault’s humanist language is a structurally imposed constraint that may be deconstructed and opened out to further his own critique of the possibilities of subjection.

The objectification of nonhuman animals: life, language and labour Life That the lives of nonhuman animals are considered devoid of meaning and purpose until humans accredit worth to them is considered self-evident in contemporary Westernised society and only brought to question when confronted with the divergent values of a distinctly non-Western and non-consumerist culture. In many indigenous cultures animals play a central role in the local economy. Their labour, contribution to soil fertility and hence productivity, provision of fuel (dung), food (milk, meat, etc.) and clothing (wool, hides), companionship and spiritual symbolism guarantees their esteemed place alongside human society.17 Thus the community is reflective of the reciprocity of all living relations and, at times, also past relations, where objectification and exploitation are regarded as ecologically shortsighted.18 In contrast, in Westernised society the norm of objectifying nonhuman animals is translated into, for example, factory farming, hunting of ‘game’, fashion paraphernalia, petting; the lives of animals are infrequently taken lightly, indiscriminately, and/or without acknowledgement of their integral being.

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The universalisation of the modern epistemological norm of objectifying nonhuman animals has abetted the capitalist trend in a significant increase in farmed animals for human consumption. Globally, as countries become more economically successful and adopt Western practices so does their meat consumption increase. The standardisation of a ‘meat culture’ has been reinforced by dominant political institutions and global structures, such as the World Bank and IMF. In the UK numbers have intensified on the land from approximately 2 million cattle, 7.4 million sheep, 2.2 million pigs and 40 million chickens in 1946 to 3.2 million cattle, 19 million sheep, 15 million pigs and 676 million chickens in 1994.19 Cooking these objectified animals creates a distinctive categorical separation for human beings from nature and animality.20 Animals may be displaced metaphorically, by naming meat differently from the animal, before consumption, but, at the same time, the flesh and organs of animals have risen in gastronomic status with socio-economic progress.21 Consumption of (other) animals, once esteemed as a supplement to the basic diet of grain and vegetables, proliferated with the advent of the modern age and its philosophical legitimation of the instrumental domination of nature. However, those who aggressively sought power have always consumed meat in greater quantities.22 The myth that only animal protein provides strength and virility and therefore that it should be consumed in quantity particularly, or sometimes solely, by men, is a symbolic patriarchal construction;23 eating animal meat may be read as a statement of human dominance: Meat satisfies our bodies but it also feeds our minds. We eat not only the animals’ flesh; with it we drain their lifeblood and so seize their strength. And it is not only that animal which we so utterly subjugate; consuming its flesh is a statement that we are the unquestioned masters of the world.24 Besides actual consumption, the integral lives of nonhuman animals are transformed according to epistemological reconfigurations. Premised upon the notion of the ‘usable’ capacity of all associated with and discovered within ‘Nature’ axiomatic to political philosophy, linguistic ordering further stratifies the world.25 Language The power of language to objectify nonhuman animals arises from the privileged epistemological location of humans, creating a divisive boundary between human and nonhuman. This boundary, like the gendered sociopolitical frame of knowledge, is ‘drawn by mapping practices; objects do not exist as such. Objects are boundary projects’. Yet, as Donna Haraway recognises, boundaries vacillate, are provisional dependent upon the ‘risky practice’ of ‘siting (sighting)’26 and thus are susceptible to reformulation. For, the


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empirical reality of the ecosystemic whole is so richly diverse and the plurality of life forms so bizarrely abundant that human languages and structural belief systems can accept discriminately only that which can be instrumental to human epistemology. All else is discarded contingently from human understanding, although remains in the ontological background to be acquired if needed.27 It follows that language that continues to perpetuate the objective status of animals is an active and culturally contingent practice. As seen, language continues to mystify animals before their consumption.28 In effect, treating animals as objects is implicitly recognised as shameful even when scientifically legitimised: What does it mean that our meat bears no sign of once being something animate? That we call it by names different from the animal it used to be? Why would the sight of a whole dead animal on the table – a sight that was, up until the seventeenth century, appetizing to Europeans – now disgust and disturb us? Perhaps we mask the animal status of our food in order to mask our own link to the animal world: to forget that we, like other animals, die, decay, and eventually become food. Perhaps the sight of a whole dead animal on the table repels because it disrupts our selfimage as the beings who transcend the merely natural, because it interferes with our attempt to define ourselves in contradistinction to the merely mortal.29 To semantically obscure animals reflects our desire to hide ourselves from the truth – for Cartesian rationality did not divorce humanity ontologically from animality, only epistemologically. Thus, since Enlightenment times, it is no longer common practice in the Western world to face up to the animal that is being consumed. Similarly, it remains psychologically disturbing to inflict pain and cruelty upon nonhumans, despite the scientific justification and legitimising philosophies of Bacon and Descartes. For this reason animal experimentation has developed in a state of shrouded secrecy, not least because of the intensive inputs of capital into the business. The premises for financial input have gained official permanence on the basis of capital investment rather than on the basis of scientific validation.30 The ambiguous grounds for animal experimentation are suppressed for the practice that, on the one hand, uses animals to reproduce ‘the perfect human surrogate’ to provide comparative data for extrapolation to human use and yet, on the other hand, requires there to be a difference between humans and animals in order to rationalise their torture and/or killing. The ‘hypocrisy’31 of this lethal game is systematically integrated into scientific rationalisation and the rationale for global capital-intensive industrialisation. Behind the facades of modern progress and beneath the layers of cultural camouflage lie the corpses of once vital beings, whose vitality was indeed essential for the experimentation, whose potential for ecological and social contribution was cut, unfulfilled:32

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Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals Like other social evils, such as slavery, child labour and the suppression of women’s rights, vivisection is all about power: the power to capture and subject normally sociable animals to a life of solitary confinement; the power to poison, burn, maim and blind and, ultimately, the power to kill. Every hour of every day another 20,000 animals die in the world’s laboratories.33

Vivisection literally means cutting of life. The reasons given for cutting life are often dubious and frequently of little, if any, medical benefit for humans.34 To hide the shameful reality, from themselves and from others, experimenters have modified their use of language to euphemistically sanction their practices: animals ‘take part’ in ‘procedures’ ‘helping’ with research, wherein ‘exhibiting lethal behaviour’ equates with dying and ‘binocular deprivation’ involves having their eyelids sewn together.35 Meat has come to symbolise (one of ) the most frequent relationship(s) of humans with nonhuman nature.36 Because meat eating is the actual incorporation of an animal, it distils the essence of human domination over other animals, but also the ambivalence of this relationship of humans with animals;37 hence the reluctance to recognise the animal that is being eaten and its signification by an alternative name (e.g., pork = pig) and cultural taboos against eating certain animals (e.g., pets and other carnivores). These constructions signify socio-cultural power relations and perpetuate further those inequities; so in times of scarcity disempowered people (children, women and invalids) are the first to be denied meat.38 Carol Adams, for these reasons, reads meat as a ‘patriarchal text’, where animals, akin to women, are ‘absent referents’, literally (because slaughtered), linguistically (because redefined as something other than live animal) and metaphorically (through anthropocentric imagery and expression). Objectification is multifaceted and pervasive. It is a necessary prerequisite before employing nonhumans for human purposes. Labour Experimentation upon animals constitutes a significant proportion of the labour provided by animals for human society. Animals act as humans’ ‘tools for research’39 where the application of ‘reason is a torture whose subject is the agent’, to borrow a quote from Foucault.40 The scientifically invalidated41 and philosophically incoherent practice of practising research upon living animals as though they were objects persists in Baconian fashion, despite biotechnological advances and the accumulation of knowledge. As described above, labouring upon animals, entailing their sacrifice, is condoned by carefully manipulated human discourses, which in turn are based upon a philosophically inconsistent logic: The cruel experimenter cannot have it both ways. He cannot, in the same breath, defend the scientific validity of vivisection on the ground of the


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physical similarities between man and the other animals and then defend the morality of vivisection on the grounds that man and animals are physically different.42 Such inconsistent reasoning for the science of animal experimentation necessitates secrecy. Alix Fano opens up this closed, actually and epistemologically, ‘system which willingly destroys one life form under the pretense of protecting another; which dominates nature, yet expects to live in harmony with it’;43 the scientific hypocrisy of considering smaller, physiologically different animals valid replacements for human beings, is exposed; the futility of refining animal experimentation, for the paradigmatic praxis remains; and the obstacles to using known testing procedures that do not rely upon animal suffering, such as in vitro testing, are analysed. Indeed, animal tests have become the ‘gold standard’, against which other methods are validated, including human results!44 Species difference has, as a result, become implicitly, yet systematically included in the findings of toxicology. In addition, the subjectivity involved in reading the results of animal experimentation (for example, the difference between ‘mild’ and ‘immoderate’ irritation) and relative lack of human data means that the rationale of minimising human suffering is not achieved. Even where chemicals have been proven to be harmful to humans, animal testing is required, prolonging their acceptance on the market. If animal testing is carried out, (there currently exists a backlog of approximately 75,000 chemical compounds available for human use that have not been tested), there is no guarantee that after being found toxic, often after repeated tests to overcome the ambiguity of the results, it will be removed from market shelves, or even labelled to warn users of its (possible) harmful effects. The interests of the chemical industry override animal experimentation, whilst promoting it.45 As a result, animal experimentation is ‘illogical, unscientific and pointless’ for not only do experimenters generally disregard the social behaviour of humans in contrast to the caged isolation of nonhumans and the compound effects of chemical accumulation within the ecosphere and human body, yet the results are often ‘managed’ or simply disregarded to further facilitate the growth of the chemical industry.46 The ability to rationalise such abuse of animal subjectivity is found in a power-differentiated anthropocentric construction of political praxis, which requires constant effort to replicate these divisive practices.

The ‘dividing practices’ This section will describe the philosophical rationales for objectification, which sanction ways of conceptualising ethical relations and legitimise political practice. Borrowing from Goethe, the human subject ‘calls it reason and uses it to be more bestial than any beast’.47 A primary relationship between many animals, including humans, is via the act of consumption. As we have seen this may be actual, visual or metaphorical

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and is the culminating practice of dominance over another, where animals are vehicles for consumption, devoid of will and identity.48 The preliminary step of objectifying another animal, that is, the denial of inherent meaning in that being, leads to rituals and/or institutional practices to legitimise this oppressive relationship in a way that obscures both the fact that we are all animals and the violence necessary to persist with this paradigmatic world view based on hierarchical exploitation. Consumption represents a fundamentally ‘intimate’, yet ‘mysterious’ practice ‘symbolic of the connectedness of life’.49 Yet, this despotic connection is abstracted, historicised and naturalised through human language. Cultural ideology and epistemology recreate ontological life forms and justify a ‘dominant material relationship in our culture’. It is normatively reasoned that the only ‘natural’ fate of some animals is to be consumed, without consideration of the nature of the animal.50 The philosophical foundation for objectifying practices has been argued on the basis of evolutionary progress. So humankind’s ‘exceptionally high’ status, in contrast to that of other ‘living beings’, requires allegiance to ‘fellow men’ [sic]. Although animals are recognised to embody ‘centres of interest’, humankind is said to be ‘the most precious fruit of creation’.51 This justification creates a transcendent separation of the politico-cultural realm of humankind from the world of nature wherein animals reside. Denial of the interdependence of all within the natural realm is a constant epistemological effort for the rationality permits no other logic yet psychologically it remains uncomfortable. So invocations of the separation of patriarchal laws from the feminised intuition of the wrongs of injury against animals as superstition reveal the powers to naturalise a masculinist and anthropocentric paradigm.52 The consequences on the ground are oppressive social relations.53 In Western logic, there are two fundamental techniques that linguistically rationalise and therefore legitimise to a greater or lesser degree the objectified status of animals: religious pastoralism and secular rationalism. Both allow behaviour that ranges from responsible care to violent abuse. The first method of religious pastoralism arises from and is mandated by lessons from Judæo-Christianity: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image . . . And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.54 This ordained perspective corresponded with Stoic philosophy. In particular, Aristotle asserted utilitarianism based upon the primacy of possession of a


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soul, which was the determining referent for a strict hierarchical ranking of life forms: Plants exist to give food to animals, and animals to give food to men – domestic animals for their use and food, wild ones, in most cases, if not in all, furnish food and other conveniences, such as clothing and various tools. Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men.55 Animals were presumed to be unreflective creatures and therefore worthless, either devoid of worth or literally worth less than humans. Socrates also espoused transcendence of nature and animality by insisting upon abstract self-conscious, whereby the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’.56 Secular treatises of Enlightenment philosophy continued this heritage. Immanuel Kant from a premise of human dominion justified restrictions upon human autonomy, reasserting the given epistemological basis of political conditions of possibility. The world was regarded as a ‘natural’ hierarchy, with God at the apex ruling free and rational human beings and, below, subject to human usage on the basis of their lack of intelligence, was to be found the remaining living things. So animals and plants could quite legitimately be regarded as human property. The advent of Cartesian scientism reinforced the philosophical conjunction of the Aristotelian view – that animals did not possess a soul and therefore were inferior beings – and the Augustinian view – of the inevitability of human conflict in a world where the only certainty was that humanity’s possession of reason allowed for the dominion of animals. The capacity to reason provided intellectual linkage from Enlightenment philosophy to the advent of scientific treatises. At the close of the sixteenth century and the dawn of the seventeenth, the ‘self-evident’ location of humans philosophically came to be reasoned upon positivist methodological foundations rather than religious premises. Science, following Francis Bacon’s trail-blazing writings, became the new modern religion. René Descartes aspired to philosophise upon this premise of human domination, in the conviction that ‘there is nothing created from which we cannot derive some use’.57 An emphasis on the ability to communicate thought necessarily excluded animals on the basis that they were considered merely instinctual beings, indeed, mechanical automata lacking consciousness: I know that animals do many things better than we do, but that doesn’t surprise me, for even this serves to prove that they act naturally and automatically, like a clock that tells time better than our own senses. Thus when the swallows arrive in the spring, they are no doubt acting as clocks.58 The appeal of Cartesianism lay in its secular reasoning and adoption of scientific objectivity: cries in the course of vivisection were comparable with the

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sounds of a ticking clock. Mechanism replaced the vitalist symbolism of medieval Aristotelianism and rationality came to be informed solely by Cartesian utilitarianism. Spinoza argued that it was clear that the law against killing of animals is based more on empty superstition and unmanly compassion than sound reason. The rational principle of seeking our own advantage teaches us to establish a bond with men, but not with the lower animals, or with things whose nature is different from human nature . . . Indeed, because the right of each one is defined by his virtue, or power, men have a far greater right against the lower animals that they have against men. Not that I deny that the lower animals have sensations. But I do deny that we are therefore not permitted to consider our own advantage, use them at our pleasure, and treat them as is most convenient for us.59 Reason, a humanly conceived capacity, is exalted as the sole determining foundation of value and dignity. Subsequently, it is argued that animals are both irrational and inconsequential in the same manner that they were denied validity in treatises based upon the centrality of possession of a soul.60 Philosophically humanism prevails, prescribing human freedom as the definitive norm of ethics and politics, where responsibilities towards animals reflect our general moral behaviour towards other vulnerable humans. Therefore we should not inflict unnecessary suffering upon animals. Any breach in this mode of behaviour is feared on the basis that it might induce callousness to human suffering. This demonstrates a perpetuation in the Stoical belief that disintegration in the instrumental value of animals would equate with a decline in civilised values; ‘the injustice is not in making use of animals, but in making use of them wrongly and thoughtlessly and cruelly’.61 This epistemological separation of humanity from the natural world of animality in ethical and philosophical debate is replicated in political theory and practice. Liberal political theory is morally founded upon notions of right, equality and justice, which gravitate from the perspective of human individuals who ‘rationally’ make private arrangements within a public frame that essentially excludes nonhuman animals. This is a contractual view, predicated upon a relative asymmetry of societal powers. Attempts to incorporate consideration of nonhuman animals within the conceptual orbit of social justice have been metaphysically constrained by the anthropocentrist foundations to ethics; Hume considered morality a ‘sentiment of humanity’ and as such ‘gentle usage’ was the most that could be expected of humans in their dealings with animals.62 Consequently, a holist view of society including nonhuman animals is illogical for society infers ‘intercourse’ from a ‘degree of equality’.63 So too is justice an exclusively human concept. In his essay ‘Duties Towards Animals and Spirits’, Kant translates morality into a contractual arrangement between beings capable of reasoning:


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So far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious, and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man . . . If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind . . . He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.64 Kant regards the realm of humanity’s moral duties to include ‘indirect’ duties to animals on the basis that ill treatment of animals may encourage a callous disposition and undermines the notion of humane respect towards fellow humans. However, the impetus is with humans to choose to treat subordinate animals with respect; so underlining the moral superiority of humanity. Contemporary theories of justice continue this philosophical heritage, referring back to the given and unquestioned ‘theory of the natural order’. Consequently, morality is dismissed and ‘no account is given of right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature’ besides the concession that ‘it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil’. Once again, we are left with the limited acceptance that ‘capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case’.65 Thus a wider metaphysical enquiry is clearly required since the inherent and exclusive humanism of political philosophy limits conceptual and epistemological understandings. Pastoralism and Enlightenment theories are merely variations within this metaphysics. Passmore is a notable exponent of pastoralist attitudes, who readily grants precedence to humans, failing to see the possibility of doing otherwise within the current paradigm. The Kantian principle of humanity’s inherent moral consideration of animals, for by doing so there will blossom the idea of ‘reverence for life’, is seen to form the philosophical basis of a belief in the preservation of the multiple diversity of species.66 However, ultimately animals are still considered ‘living things’: means to an end incapable of possessing rights, even when the multiplicity of life is revered and species diversity is recognised to enrich the human world, psychologically and materially. As the above debate has implied, ‘rationalism’, ‘moralism’ and ‘scientism’ may be defined as the three cultural processes that emanate from the given exclusionary metaphysics.67 The reductionist approach to humanist discourse structurally constrains the space for nonhumans and may even be condescending when applied to nonhuman animals. For, a focus upon human rights is necessarily dismissive of ‘[e]mpirical observations about the variety of intelligence or of ordinary self-consciousness among different kinds of animal’.68 Anthropocentrism defines the discourse and is reinforced through its articulation of rights via the medium of human language. Thomas Hobbes, an authority figure within political philosophy, states:

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Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals [to] make convenants with bruit Beasts, is impossible, because, not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of, any translation of Right, nor can translate any Right to one another; and without mutual acceptation, there is no Convenant.69

Confusing rights with the method of expression becomes ‘an ideological smokescreen’ obfuscating an epistemological understanding for structural ontology. In the process differential power ratios are reified.70 Whether it is appropriate to apply rights to nonhumans is therefore highly questionable. Even if nature is considered the foundational premise for politics, it is still inappropriate: Animal rights are not natural in the sense that they exist in spontaneous nature. Rights go with legitimate claims and entitlements, but there are no titles and no laws that can be transgressed in the wilderness.71 For the consequence of the humanist discourse of rights is that animals are logically perceived to be of no intrinsic worth and accordingly incapable of possessing even interests: A mere thing, however valuable to others, has no good of its own. The explanation of that fact . . . is that mere things have no conative life; neither conscious wishes, desires, and hopes; nor urges and impulses; nor unconscious drives, aims, goals; nor latent tendencies, directions of growth, and natural fulfilments. Interests must be compounded somehow out of conations; hence mere things have no interests.72 Those nonhuman animals who are mere ‘things’ with no inherent value from which to generate autonomous identity and agency are anthropocentric epistemological constructions: that they are also ontological real beings with their own integrity is not permitted to be seen. The causal link between moral philosophising, political theorising and institutionalised discriminatory behaviour is devastating. This ‘imperialist legacy’ requires constant reification; ‘some morally inconsiderable Others (or at least some hierarchy of more and less considerable Others) over which legitimately to exercise power and control’: Thus, the institution of any practice of any criterion of moral considerability is an act of power over, and ultimately an act of violence toward, those others who turn out to fail the test of the criterion and are therefore not permitted to enjoy the membership benefits of the club of consideranda.73 Metaphysics that align exclusion of both moral and political consideration of nonhuman animals incites discriminatory practices based upon an


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ignorance of the ontological interdependence of the whole ecological sphere. The result is cognitive and emotional confusion: an increasingly sentimental view of animals as pets and objects of contemplation jostle[s] uneasily alongside the harsh facts of a world in which the elimination of ‘pests’ and the breeding of animals for slaughter [has grown] every day more efficient.74 In pre-modern times animals and humans shared proximate and parallel existences despite their integral differences. The modern cultural marginalisation of animals was a theoretical tactic to dispel the empirical linkage. For example, Borneo tribes, until ‘enlightened’ by Europeans, regarded gibbons as kin and therefore respected them in the same manner as humans and yet thereafter started to hunt them like any other creature.75 Composing an interceding level of life between humanity and nature, animals are accredited with existential dual roles for they are treated as inanimate stock and revered in idolatry fashion.76 In contrast, in nomadic, pastoralist societies animals are viewed as of subjective significance for the livelihood of the people – the people express gratitude to the produce of the animals, milk and their flesh, and abhor profligacy, cruelty and waste. They also act as intermediaries between the human and the cosmological worlds so that human hunters and herders strive to ‘see themselves and the world around them through the eyes of the animal’.77 A totem relationship differs from the objectifying gaze of modern societies – which is not to say that totemism is not contemporary too – by dispelling the logic of binary oppositions. However, like all classifying conceptual rationalisations of (perceived) relationships, totemism may be perceived as a theoretical phenomenon that structurally tidies ontology to fit language.78 The metaphysical confusion bequeathed to human society is further buffered by Darwinism – itself a double-edged source of illumination. Darwin informed us not only of humans’ evolutionary co-existence with other animals, but also legitimised a hierarchical conception of the animal world with humans at the apex and thus the blueprint of all comparison.79 The second clause is a cultural assertion to minimise the profoundly disturbing impact of the first admission. As a consequence, it has been argued that this humanistic influence legitimises, via specious rationalisation, the colonisation of ‘brute’ ‘prehuman’ beings, encouraging a zoophobic attitude.80 There has evolved a situation of ‘indefinite coexistence, in separate cultural spaces, . . . of intensifying reification, and growing conviviality’.81 The chasm between ontological representation and epistemological perception has grown so that the ideologies arising from such a transcendent and universalised epistemology have become divorced from the realities of life. Cartesian rationality justifies the objectification of animals, which in practice ranges from pet keeping to automated slaughter. The immense and intensifying changes in

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the scale and intensity of technological manipulation of all animate and inanimate beings, viewed as objects and thus potential economic resources, is founded upon a selective but, nonetheless, powerfully constructed history. As Midgley explicitly reminds us, we humans, in culturally controlling the objective status of animals, have mapped ourselves against an abstract mythical landmark. Animals have been metaphorically recomposed as ‘projections of our fears and desires’ denying integral symbolic autonomy.82 That there still persists dichotomous epistemological variations of animals as ‘enigmatic’ others ‘of nature’ and ‘dreamed objects’ arousing feelings of both sadism83 and compassion,84 reflects the ideological block constructed according to the narcissistic egoism of humans and our subsequent narrow vision of ethics. Mary Midgley refers to the ‘sense of unreality’ that we humans have put in the way of reaching any understanding of ‘our moral relations with animals’.85 For our psychological and emotional comfort, nonhuman animals have been metaphorically and symbolically represented from a distant attitude that dismisses difference. The animal is perceived as ‘unnatural’ and requires reconstitution to fit the cultural ‘other’ mould and cannot even be made to make a meaningful statement about humanity, besides the indulgent disrespect towards the animal itself.86 However, a different perspective, wherein the subject status and integral worth of a nonhuman animal is considered prior to human desires, is possible.

Becoming a subject Using the adopted Foucauldian genealogy the objectified subject may be rediscovered as a subject; epistemologically the subject becomes congruent with its ontological nature of an integral being. The subject may be viewed as an individual or a community focused around species-being; both levels of perception recognise, to varying degrees, the social and ecological embeddedness of all animals. The individual animal Recognising the animal as worthy of subject status has a long and hard(ly)won conceptual history; Montaigne and Hume were notable seventeenthcentury writers who disputed the Cartesian logic of human superiority over animals on the basis of the void of rationality and (expression of ) sensation inherent in animals. Both insisted upon the Stoic principle of humane and just treatment of all life. Montaigne, in particular, found objectifying logic ‘absurdly presumptuous’.87 He rebuked the foundation of rationalism based upon the ability to communicate through language, thereby denying validity to animals, as unreal: ‘They caress us, threaten us, and beg of us, and we do the same to them’.88 It was recognised that an expansion of the metaphysical barriers containing humanism was needed for it ruled out a holistic perspective of morality:

Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals 153 Genuine morality [is] outraged by the proposition that beings devoid of reason (hence animals) are things and therefore should be treated merely as means that are not at the same time an end . . . Thus only for practice are we to have sympathy for animals, and they are, so to speak, the pathological phantom for the purpose of practicing sympathy for human beings.89 Cartesianism has also been absolutely refuted as an absurdity divorced from empirical observation: ‘Animals are not machines; . . . actually only machines are machines’.90 Or, alternatively, if animals are machines then so too, runs the Cartesian logic, are humans, to an extent, as Rousseau observed in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality: In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has given sense in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it. I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent.91 The consequence of Cartesianism, that is, unmitigated indifference to animals by humans, authorising the treatment of animals as ‘simple things devoid of the slightest ethical significance’ led Maupertuis to question human aversion to violence against them: ‘If animals were pure machines, to kill them would be a morally indifferent but ridiculous act: like smashing a watch’.92 Instead animals have the capacity to incite a multitude of feelings in us, the overwhelming reaction being one of abhorrence if our behaviour towards them is an indication of our pathos. Furthermore animals, analogous to humans, are capable of adaptive nonmechanical orientation and demonstrate compassionate behaviour. Suffering is therefore a shared attribute of humans and animals. Thus, ‘considered in nonutilitarian fashion, this suffering furnishes a synthesis between the idea that one must respect animals in order not to debase man and the idea that animals possess intrinsic rights’.93 Since all beings, irrespective of physical and mental form, are able to experience pleasure and pain moral consideration may lead to the possession of rights. Alternately, the fundamental moral right common to all animals, including humans – the preservation of life – may provide a basis for the ascription of moral rights.94 This philosophical basis undermines the principle of anthropocentric humanism and advocates protection of interests, whoever the subject. The moral community is inclusive of all beings based upon the proof of the common characteristic of life regardless of species. Both humans and nonhuman animals share a fundamental interest in avoiding pain and preserving life. Regardless of the worth and interests of any animal, all suffering is comparable and of equal moral significance. Charles Darwin’s publication, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals

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(1872), was of profound significance within the social sciences, with regard to recognising that pain, and its expression via non-linguistic modes of communication, was a connecting characteristic that passed the species barrier. This led to the cognitive manoeuvre of the recognition of the shared evolutionary history of all animals including humans.95 Indeed, the lampooning of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which had been published in response to Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, by the Platonist, Thomas Taylor, with his publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) demonstrates the trajectory of moral and political philosophy.96 Advocacy of animal rights and the politicisation of social inequalities were recognised to share the same paradigmatic origin of exploitative dominance. Indeed, the social philanthropist, Henry Salt argued forthrightly for the rights of animals in two publications, Animal Rights (1892) and Animal Rights Considered in relation to Social Progress (1894). He believed that animals should ‘undoubtedly’ possess rights. These rights consisted in the ‘restricted freedom’ to live according to the individual’s natural life-course within the dynamics of the larger community.97 Also, at the turn of the century, the Honourable Stephen Coleridge98 highlighted the inegalitarian nature of English law in respect to vivisection practices as a strategical ploy to draw to the public attention the licensing and therefore legitimation of torture of some animals by people of certain professions and exclusive social groups, and therefore not a law based on consistent logic.99 This reasoning originated from Jeremy Bentham who, at the end of the eighteenth century, foresaw the broadening of human, male enfranchisement, as the beginning of a positive liberatory movement and he was not unsupported in this conviction:100 The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant a day or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose it were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?101 This quotation has become the inspiration for one of the most vocal and zealous contemporary advocates for animals: Peter Singer. Singer argues that the fundamental principle of species equality, or, to be more precise, ‘equal


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consideration of interests’, is a moral basis of politics that is applicable beyond the human circle and may be extended to apply to animals;102 where speciesism is another discriminating practice, analogous to racism and sexism. Accordingly, humanism is a strain of speciesism; a ‘speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. . . . Most human beings are speciesist’.103 From this perspective, it may be argued that discrimination against nonhuman animals is fundamentally a matter of superficial aesthetics with regard to physical appearance.104 Although the notion of ethics has progressively expanded and any form of discrimination within the moral community is indefensible, it does not follow that equal inclusion within the circle of moral considerability translates politically into equal, legally-enforceable rights emanating from an equivalence of worth. It does, nevertheless, provoke reflection upon the diversity of lives and intrinsic value of each body, disturbing Cartesian (utilitarian) assumptions. It is no coincidence that Singer entitles his polemical, yet practical book Animal Liberation105 knowing that: A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons and an extension or reinterpretation of the basic moral principle of equality. Practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable come to be seen as the result of an unjustifiable prejudice.106 Metaphysical and moral expansion of human-defined political parameters allows for the conceptualisation of rights for individual nonhuman animals who are seen as ‘conscious entities’.107 The basis of consciousness to rights’ attribution is a refinement of Bentham’s ‘sentience’ qualification. Tom Regan argues that it is ‘simply projustice, insisting only that the scope of justice be seen to include respect for the rights of animals’.108 Individual animals have a ‘prima facie’ right not to be harmed for they are recognised to exist regardless of their human resource value, beauty or species number.109 Recognition of the intrinsic dignity of the individual animal logically permits the consideration of each as a ‘moral subject’ where the common experience of life is the basis of moral consideration. Indeed, Regan asserts that animal rights are ‘cut from the same moral cloth’ as human rights movements: ‘The fundamental wrong is the system’ that portrays and legitimises the object status of animals so that they may be exploited, tortured and killed for human sport or relative gain. ‘Once we accept this view of animals – as our resources – the rest is as predictable as it is regrettable.’110 Sentience and recognition of the pain caused merely compound the structural evil. Regan’s argument stresses the rationality of the logic of applying rights to animals to evade critiques of sentimentalism. Borrowing Kantian logic regarding attribution of rights to animals as ‘indirect duties’ to humanity, animals are theoretically granted an ‘equal natural right to life’, whether plentiful or rare, founded upon the shared capacity to reason and make choices, a concept of ‘self’ and the recognition that humans do not always possess all of these defining abilities.

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Consequently, the logic of defining rights according to sentience, like the concept of rationality, remains problematic for there is nothing intrinsically applicable solely to humans, about rights premised upon rationality or sentience. As a result, the onus is upon humans to justify morally any practices that invalidate the natural right to life of animals.111 The ascription of rights may be a human preserve, but the fact that rights are given does not necessarily entail differences in worth or a lack of respect. For the act of according rights requires conscious ethical consideration and subsequent political reformulation. However, the concept of rights is specific to an individual – as a conscious being. Whereas a species cannot collectively be said to have ‘beliefs, expectations, wants or desires’. Rather, species preservation is the preserve of legal institutions, which implies a human interest and secondary interest in the rights of the individual; caution is required when including animals within an essentially human discourse. In anticipation of the charge of demeaning anthropomorphisation, Feinberg recognises that the choice of traits highlighted reveals our prejudices; whether we select humanoid similarities or differences and for whose interests we consider some animals and not others as creatures worthy of moral integrity.112 Rodman also exposes the double standards implicit when considering animals on an individual basis using concepts normally associated with humans. For animals are accorded a number of rights by virtue of their possession of consciousness and/or sentience and, consequently, by inclusion in the human realm they are found lacking and are thus compared in derogatory fashion to defective human beings. In sum, extension of human rights to animals essentially renders them inferior beings and denies them their own particular subjectivities: They are degraded rather by our failure to respect them for having their own existence, their own character and potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, their own grandeur – and by our tendency to relate to them either by reducing them to the status of instruments for our own ends or by ‘giving’ them rights by assimilating them to the status of inferior human beings.113 Acknowledgment of the rights of animals is a task with infinite consequences. Moral extensionism may illuminate not only the common attribute of life but also ‘the uniqueness of interests and needs built into each creature’s telos’. However, this foundation does not entail ‘treating each animal as a little human’.114 Accordingly, critiques of the moral extensionist argue that it is potentially ‘pernicious’: It is the difference between (1) the arrogant and condescending admission to the moral club of those animals which resemble humans sufficiently enough to deserve consideration and (2) a highly contextual attempt to see clearly what a human being is and what the nonhuman world might


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be, morally speaking, for human beings . . . Whereas on the first view we have not only an impoverished sense of what constitutes human morality, but also a condescending view of animals as at best inferior humans, on the second view the limits of moral regard are set only by the limitations of one’s own ability to respond in a caring manner, which, in turn, are a function of the depth of one’s own understanding of the human moral community and the clarity and depth of one’s understanding of, and relationship to, the nonhuman world or elements of that world.115 This argument corresponds with the Kantian idea of humanity learning to be humane through moral inclusion of nonhuman animals. Indeed, the dualistic superiority of humans is considered to remain intact, even when moral visions are extended. The promotion of the idea that all living entities are inherently morally considerable is demeaning when theoretically aligned with a human-oriented and an atomist perspective which entails a moral hierarchy; where some animals are morally more significant and may legitimately override the interests of lesser animals. To epistemologically and ethically expand humanity’s metaphysical horizons to include the pluralistic contributions of each living subject and regard the social community holistically, requires an open attitude of amazement at the remarkable abilities of all life including humanity.116 If this were the conceptual premise for regarding nonhuman animals it would be seen, for example, that chimpanzees differ genetically from human beings by only around 1.5 per cent of total genetic constitution. Thus the notion of a gulf of difference between nonhuman animal and human animal is problematised and the ethics of killing another animal is not exceptionally clear cut. Subscribing to this logic, chimpanzees have been said to represent ‘the first battleground’ in reasserting the ethical and epistemological subject status of nonhumans.117 Roger Fouts, who has been caring for and working with chimpanzees, researching communication abilities throughout his adult life and at the Central Washington University since 1980, advocates the acceptance of apes and chimpanzees as a conceptual stepping stone to acceptance of our relatedness with animals and ‘a reverence for life’.118 Animal experimentation is not carried out upon unthinking creatures; Washoe, Koko, Sarah, Lana and Michael are just some of the chimpanzees and great apes that have proved that communication, via sign language, is not exclusively a human trait. They demonstrate sufficient intelligence to spontaneously create new words to compensate for a lack in vocabulary,119 arrange words together to further conversation, imaginatively name and care for pets and show grief at their death, be deceitful, paint from memory and depict feelings.120 Whether this is real communication or not, the abilities of these animals to learn or mimic human skills and contribute to the human world121 – skills that do not come naturally to them, since they are of no benefit in their natural socio-ecological setting – demonstrates competence and agility in the areas of cognition and emotion. Furthermore, such

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findings belie the arrogant notion of human superiority. However, although focusing upon the individual animal subjects cognitively disturbs anthropocentrism, in political practice the subject of the animal species is more effective for sustaining biological and social diversity, as discussed in the following section. The species of animal A species is as defined and atomistic as an individual; both have been bounded and given identity genetically as they have evolved. Ultimately it is the extinction of the species that is of concern to conservationists; the demise of the individual is relatively insignificant: ‘No individual crosses the extinction threshold; the species does’.122 Obviously, this qualification changes when the species is represented by only a few remaining individual animals. Despite the shared attributes of all animals, the breadth of distinction within the given ‘lumpen, unified’ animal realm means that there is conceptual significance in differentiating life forms according to species: There are gradients of passage, but emergences are real. There are no sharp lines, no neatly specifiable, philosophical essences in evolutionary theory; what we find is a valued gestalt of features present in our species and absent in other species.123 Apes may represent the ‘gradient’ of ‘passage’ between human and primate; this is recognised in calls to designate apes as ‘semi-human’.124 Acceptance would incite a fundamental re-evaluation of the artificial moral boundary that separates humans from apes and problematise their captivity, use for medical experimentation and any other methods of objectification. Unfortunately, within international treaties, theorising upon the endangered status of nonhuman animal species has not entailed the rejection of the intellectual attachments of a hierarchical understanding of animals. Nor, as a consequence, have these treaties been effective in halting the decimation of nonhuman animal species, despite the mainstream acceptance of a number of international treaties.125 The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was first signed in 1946 and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) was set up in 1973.126 Yet, the effectiveness of such trade prohibiting regimes is debatable considering both past rates of decline in protected animals and even anticipated rates. In the course of the next generation, at current rates, half of all known animal species will have become extinct, that is, between 40,000 and 50,000 species annually.127 Therefore, although the acknowledgment of animals is not a recent development, the relative ease of adopting inter-state agreements concerning animals can be equated with their ineffectiveness because fundamentally animals are considered things, the object of human politics and the paradigmatic


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anthropocentric perspective remains undisturbed. Attempts to evade anthropocentric epistemological objectification are inherently problematic when considering animals at the species level. One prominent example of the consequence of regarding a species as merely a means for human use is the increase in numbers of domesticated farm animals; indeed, ‘an alien ecologist observing . . . earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant [larger bodied] species in our biosphere’.128 Furthermore, farm animals are prolific eaters of the world’s protein supplies; for every 10 kg of vegetable protein fed to cattle, only 1 kg is converted into meat (animal protein); the remainder is excreted.129 Water consumption rates in relation to food produced are also significantly higher for animal production than grain production.130 Not only are they empirically dominant and massive consumers, as an inevitable result, they are also environmentally polluting subjects; ruminant animals produce 80 million tons of gas per annum and 35 million tons of concentrated waste, which amount to 15–20 per cent of global methane emissions, contributing significantly to global warming.131 This may appear to be a facetious aside; however the ecological consequences of these human results, that is the cattle, when reconceived as a species of animal of subject value, reveals the problems that arise when animals are removed from their socio-environmental context. The excessive breeding of certain animals, in this case, cattle, for human consumption has brought about unforeseen environmental consequences that have inadvertently increased their subjective force.132 Indeed, domesticated animals have been termed environmental freaks, since they reside within human culture but are not properly of it. Yet, they no longer have an alternative environmental niche.133 This leads to consideration of a biocentric epistemological perspective where reductionist atomism is ruled out because the holistic interdependency of life is the prior attitude. In spurning the separation of defined subjects – whether collective subjects, such as the species group, or atomised subjects, such as individual animals – contingency and pluralism are acknowledged, according to the ontological ecological and cultural contexts, as the epistemological bases of politics; thus diverse subjects may be perceived – including humans and nonhumans. The acceptance of a ‘fundamental continuity between the animal species and the human species’ would allow for recognition of instances when animals are superior and deflates Singer’s notion of speciesism.134 Qualitative appraisal of the intrinsic characteristics of animals no matter what their species is defined according to a holistic understanding of contingent context. All ecologically and socially embedded vital beings The ‘basic intuition’ of deep ecology – that all living entities within this organic global ecosphere are of equal intrinsic value – looks beyond the bound tangible life forms of individuals and species. As the example of cattle demonstrated, ‘moral atomism . . . does not seem well adapted to coping

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with ecological systems’.135 Viewed holistically, no one subject is of greater significance within the interconnected web of life. A biocentric perspective does not designate, in definitive terms, the boundaries of moral considerability besides the general existence of life. To quote Warwick Fox, this perspective is based upon ‘the idea that we can make no firm ontological divide in the field of existence: That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human and nonhuman realms’.136 It not only transcends anthropocentrism in its call for respect for all living entities but also thereby sublimates animals, including human animals, to the holistic life of the ecosystem. Both individuals and entities of species are recognised as mere infinitesimal atoms in the whole picture and are subjected in a subordinate manner to the exigencies of the whole of nature: There are no boundaries and everything is interrelated. But insofar as we perceive things as individual organisms or entities, the insight draws us to respect all human and nonhuman individuals in their own right as parts of the whole without feeling the need to set up hierarchies of species with humans at the top.137 Instead, the focus of concern should be the biotic community. Following an ‘egalitarian ecosystem ethic’ this community comprises all living things, including human beings: The role of all is to ‘preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community’.138 Thus the superiority of human beings is dismissed as absurd for s/he is only another member of the biotic community. Other ecophilosophers do allow human beings a pre-eminent position of responsibility within the total animal realm, based upon the uniqueness of Homo sapiens, its special capacities among millions of kinds of other living beings, [which] has been used as a premise for domination and mistreatment. Ecosophy uses it as a premise for a universal care that other species can neither understand nor afford.139 Arne Naess developed this basic insight into two ultimate norms of ecological politics: self-realisation and biocentric equality, both of which transcend cultural divisions between species of animals. Self-realisation regards the individual as a being who is consciously embedded in and contextualised by the organic ecosystem; biocentric equality is premised upon the realisation that all animate life forms possess intrinsic value and have ‘an equal right to live and blossom’: ‘Biospherical egalitarianism – in principle’.140 A naturalistic realist perspective also illuminates the material and social continuity between animals within a common environment.141 This perspective allows for the identification of specific human qualities (without conceding human superiority) to define individual rights for the whole community according to contingent ecological determinants. Thus, atomism is overcome through contextualised individualism: the individual is indissolubly


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‘embodied’ vis-à-vis the ecological and socio-cultural environments. So the practices of a liberal, capitalist democracy, that underscore liberal-individualist rights but muddle and even legitimise estrangement and abuse between species, are exposed through inclusion of the social dimensions of embeddedness. The fundamental axiom for species preservation is that context matters: ‘The species can only be preserved in situ; the species ought to be preserved in situ.’142 Even though the conundrum of humanity’s capability to consciously mediate relations with the environment and others through a biocentric lens remains, it may be translated as a duty: ‘The human role is ethical, metaphysical, scientific, religious, and in this sense humans are unique and superior, but their superiority is linked in a feedback loop with the whole’.143 Co-evolutionary social relationships have always existed between nonhumans and humans: This ontology of a ‘mixed community’ is generally ignored in epistemology and ethical debate. To persist in refusing to see the multispecies characteristic of our communities entails a denial of ‘this peculiar human talent’ – humanity’s ‘special powers and graces’ – to co-exist with other animals.144 There needs to be a cognitive opening to this reality and theorisation from this revised epistemology. For, in practice, all species of animals have learnt to read others’ patterns of behaviour in order to share the same ecosystem. For humans this understanding across the species barrier has often translated into modes of exploitation that was only rendered possible because of the personal and mutual bond formed between the animal and human. Nonhuman animals are social creatures who have comprehended and responded to their teachers from an unambiguous stance of trust; even animal experimenters require the compliance of their subjects of study. Conversely, ‘co-evolution and interdependency’ are not always antithetical to the nonhuman animals’ well-being or to their capacity to sustain a life of autonomy appropriate to their species (e.g. pet keeping). This concession does not absolve modern, intensive livestock rearing practices, which do violate such conditions. For ‘the representational goals’ or integral purpose of each animal, which constitute the integral life of an animal are treated as means and not ends in themselves.145 Thus we return to the term, ‘species’, if value is seen to inhere in specific behavioural patterns, which may be predetermined according to orientation towards goals that are in turn circumscribed by the species. The overlap between an ecocentric/biocentric perspective and that prioritising species is inevitable. For delimitation of conceptual boundaries is inimical to the ontological interdependencies found in communities. Inversely, an atomistic perception is of limited significance and relevance. An epistemology that views all animals within their particular ecocultural context may also reveal the interdependent power relationships within the community. Such a holistic perspective requires metaphysical support in order to challenge the prevailing political paradigm. For currently, differential power relations persist and determine the concepts and subjects to be included. The result is that the world is becoming increasingly depleted: a silent ark146 with

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‘absent subjects’.147 Rediscovering animals as worthy of subject status is only the necessary cognitive first step; overcoming the normalising powers of the status quo in order to theorise and practise politics to reflect this and, hopefully, curb the depletion of our relations on this shared earth is still required, as the final section of this chapter discusses.

The power of the subject Placing the political focus upon animals is disturbing, because it raises complex and deep-seated questions about humanity. Western politics may be founded on Aristotle’s definition of the human as ‘the political animal’ yet, since ‘the Western tradition has centered its energies on exploring the political side of human identity while neglecting the animal side’, the essential animalism of humanity has been overlooked.148 Further, the animal subject, whether an individual or a species, epistemologically remains objectified – ‘a given, already set thing to which we can refer as if we were not involved in its construction’.149 It is this construction that needs to be questioned and not the animal subject per se. Human constructs reveal the power imbalance involved in epistemologically reframing the relations of this world. The discourse of rights is an example of this: in extending rights to animals, it necessarily objectifies animals, founded as it is upon exclusive human premises. The rights discourse is fundamentally a human discourse of modern origins that does not paradigmatically escape its defining logic of anthropocentrism, even androcentrism, and a politics structured to satisfy those particular needs. Thus, rights are an inappropriate distraction when applied to animals and the whole ecological realm. This is not an invalidation of the inclusion of animals within the moral community, but a refusal to adopt ethical theorisation of humanist rhetoric, which according to ‘modern convention’ perceives only abstract individuals, whereas ‘environmental ethics locates ultimate value in the biotic community and assigns differential moral value to the constitutive individuals relatively to that standard’.150 It would demonstrate an insensitivity and disrespectful ethos towards the integral life form and telos of nonhuman animals to expect nonhumans to interact with humans as comparable moral agents. The same is true in a qualified sense of the political notion of liberation: domestication and breeding of animals determined by human selectivity has created large numbers of a few species of farmed animals who are so tractable and dependent upon humans that freedom is meaningless. This is not true of ‘indentured’ ‘wild’ animals, that is, animals captive in zoos.151 It is the implicit anthropocentric norms that are problematic, rather than the subjects themselves. Nevertheless, dismissal of cultural constructs as unbecoming of animals should not take epistemological precedence over the ecological perspective of the whole moral community, the members of which are all essentially related and intertwined psychologically, physiologically and materially. Humanism is not only theoretically inappropriate with reference to animals


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but it is also ‘subtly degrading to animals to compare them with “defective humans’’ ’. Instead, as Robyn Eckersley acknowledges, there is a ‘need to liberate nonhuman entities from the “status of human resource, human product, human caricature’’ ’.152 However, in attempting to deepen the rights discourse underpinning liberal democracy to include nonhumans, ‘morally, politically and legally’, Eckersley argues that ultimately diffuse openness would be translated into arbitrary and contingent limits and that, theoretically and practically, moral humanism is overwhelmingly powerful. Thus, status quo politics can be left effectively undisturbed; humanist discourse may persist and nonhumans remain excluded in a theoretical construction that can remain dismissive of the naturalised and natural constituents. In her caution not to be didactic, theoretical timidity allows for the preservation of anthropocentrism, rather than biocentrism. For such reasons, Rolston is cautious of not being ‘covertly anthropocentric’ or ‘humane’ in attributing rights to animals on the basis of kinship with ‘attractive’ animals sharing humanoid characteristics, and dismisses rights discourse, preferring to assert every animal’s possession of ‘an independent integrity’ which should resist human violation: We might at first think that there are ‘rights’ behind each of the pairs of eyes that we confront. But that is not so; what is there is a fierce ‘wildness’. The value of that is indisputable, even though it is a value that is not carried adequately by the concept of rights.153 Instead, he attempts to recapture the dynamism inherent in life theoretically by arguing for recognition that morality resides in both the individual and the species. In doing so he accords individual animals the status of moral agents who collectively instantiate and pass on their integral, animate dignity through the species. This logic is founded upon an understanding of morality that is closely associated with reciprocity of rights and duties between moral agents emanating from the empirical observation of our ‘entwined destinies’. However, ultimately the pre-eminent position of humans is not challenged. The onus is placed upon humans to ‘learn interspecific altruism’ even though it is acknowledged that anthropocentrism is fictional, based upon an ‘over specialized’ ethos of discrimination.154 Rolston urges us to be ‘discriminating’ ethicists, to not be ‘species-blind’, but respectful of other animals. His insistence, despite affirming the necessity of grounding ethics ecologically, upon ‘humans as moral, cognitive, critical overseers’ means that the dualism between nonhuman animals and humans remains in place, although in flux. Instead, it is affirmed that humans hold the potential to ‘take something more than an anthropocentric view. In their complexity, they can know and value the complexity of their world’ whereas animals, in opposition, are limited to gastrocentrism (a focus upon food), selfcentredness (protection of their own life) and propagation of its species.155 However, in place of rights is the consideration of goods, which

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Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals are to be judged for the animal in its niche, and the distinctively human goods (morality, language-rationality, self-awareness, espousing world views), like the array of animal goods (agility, perception, endurance, fertility), are good only relatively in a niche, not absolutely or hierarchically better. Everything is a satisfactory fit in its place.156

Recognising and defining the differences between humans and animals according to the above criteria does not dislodge human pre-eminence in epistemologically framing moral and political worth. The human-constructed norm for politicisation presents a formidable metaphysical and epistemological barrier. This is depicted, colourfully, through Norton’s analogy of ‘Aunt Tilly’s drawer’ whereby the collection of objects, in this case the species of animals, is saved ‘just in case’ they may be of use sometime in the future implying that they are not subjects with inherent rights to life but objects of (possible) commodity value for humans.157 Instead, ecosystemic diversity requires a broadening of this essentially reductionist paradigm of individual protection to a holistic perspective where individual species contribute to the synergism of the natural community, even if this may involve a competitive curtailment of some animals’ rights.158 The axiomatic, even if fictionalised, political discourse of anthropocentrism has informed society with a zoophobic consideration of animals, according to Luc Ferry, that contrasts with the postmodernist aspirations of contemporary articulations of the social sciences.159 If it is true that zoophobia reigns and if the purpose of philosophy, as Hegel proclaimed, is to capture ‘one’s time in thought’160 then the expanding normative impact of animals needs to be translated into political strategy. Indeed, political philosopher, Richard Rorty incites us to recognise our ‘solidarity’ with our animal relations and challenge the idea that there is a ‘natural’ cut in the spectrum of similarities and differences which spans the difference between you and a dog, . . . a cut which marks the end of the rational beings and the beginning of nonrational ones, the end of moral obligation and the beginning of benevolence. . . . [F]eelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary.161 In fact, humanism bequeaths us the privilege and responsibility of redrawing these artificial cuts and thereby possibly perceiving holistically all lives. ‘Given the history of homocentric imperialism, the “receptive” capacity of animals to “see things in their own right”, as having their own character and direction independent of us’162 is metaphysically and politically challenging. The fundamental and shared sensations of pain and humiliation bind us as a community; all other traditional boundaries are historically and culturally circumstantial. Rorty blames Kant for imposing upon moral philosophy a


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transcendent obligation so that empirical observations were rated as inconsequential; identification was relegated to abstract ‘pure reason’. Such reason, in this debate on the epistemological expansion of the political realm, is intimately associated with the limitations of Cartesianism; ‘the subject, the cogito, cannot be the sole and unique pole of meaning without nature being ipso facto divested of all moral value’.163 This is the root of the binary separating culture, composed solely of rational humans, from nature, an irrational emptiness awaiting instrumental meaning according to the mental deliberations of human subjects. Midgley regards the Cartesian legacy as absolutist in its continued pervasiveness within theorising and its tendency to quash alternatives. However, she is adamant: Duties need not be quasi-contractual relations between symmetrical pairs of rational human agents. There are all kinds of other obligations holding between asymmetrical pairs . . . it is the business of each not to forget his [sic] transitory and dependent position, the rich gifts which he [sic] has received, and the tiny part he [sic] plays in a vast, irreplaceable and fragile whole.164 In modern discourse it is forgotten that observation between animals and humans is two-way; that animals may observe us and, as a consequence, this free flow of knowledge dissolves concentrations of power. It is a marriage with no absolution clause: ‘For better or for worse we are all in the world together, and will do better to remember this, allowing weight to our immediate loyalties but not tyrannizing over other life’.165 This implication of a spiritual dimension accepts the neo-platonic conviction that all animate creatures are intuitively attuned with the phenomenal natural world, if we are honest enough to break through the blurring clouds of cultural constructions. Acceptance of an epistemological continuum would disturb the certainty of human power over nonhuman animals. Anna Bramwell also cautions us to remain consciously receptive to such epistemological openness, for the pervasive strength of the intellectual legacy that we inherit of objectifying animals will remain a background taint: The belief that any alteration of another’s being is wrong, even if inspired by care and affection, may or may not be true; but an awareness of the potentially sadistic aspect of being object to subject, once stated, lingers. . . . To cease from dominant-inspired relationships would be as violent a social and familial change as the attempt to refrain from sexual congress was at the turn of the first century AD; yet once a moral idea has been proposed – and believed – it creates its own reality, its own validity.166 The power of this new, quasi-spiritual belief which Bramwell terms ‘ethology’ is to recreate another epistemological perspective that regards the ecological

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whole scene, accepting both nonhumans and humans as constituent agents with ecologically and socially contingent agency, conceptually releases us from a fascination with modern, Cartesian rationality. Baker’s poststructuralist ‘decentring’ of the subject is another method, representing a subtle, if ‘benevolent manipulation, of exploring what animals might yet be made to signify’.167 The subject status of animals is effectively suppressed, even if the hegemony of human consideration is not challenged. In response to such ineffectiveness Ferry attempts to retrace the history of ethical and political behaviours towards animals; to recapture conceptually ‘a pre-modern, which is to say a prehumanistic, relationship to the animal kingdom as well as to nature in general’.168 The violence in the rupture of thought to the modern convention of objectifying animals is brokered by drawing upon pre-modern stories of ‘enigmatic’ animal subjects to suggest an alternative paradigm for civilisation in which both humans and nonhuman animals can peacefully coexist. However, the insistence upon the ‘imperious “civilizing” activity of the Cartesians’ alongside a Heidiggerian respect for diversity169 illustrates the difficulty of evading the modern humanist legacy. A more promising attempt to break free theoretically from modernist discourse and to confront the eruption of modern boundaries is put forward by Donna Haraway. She finds that the application of modern technology to animals may accredit subjective power to animals in their embodied fusion of human science with their own natural status; an example is the OncoMouseTM, ‘a technobastard’, ‘sibling’ ‘sister’, in essence ‘a mammal’, and also ‘a site for the operation of a transplanted, human, tumor-producing gene – an oncogene – that reliably produces breast cancer’, and is constructed as a subject, that is, a mortal figure signifying human privilege. For the mouse represents potentially human salvation from cancer and is essentially a technological superior experiment in Cartesian rationality. As such Haraway’s hope that ‘OncoMouseTM is many things simultaneously’ – an embodiment of the implosion of modern science and Aristotelian life – is illusory: ‘s/he is an invention’, patented by humans despite the inherent life of the creature. As the inventors, humans need to take noninnocent responsibility for using living beings in these ways and not to talk and write, and act as if OncoMouseTM , or other kinds of laboratory animals, were simply test systems, tools, means to brainier mammals’ ends, and commodities. Like other family members in Western biocultural taxanomic systems, these sister mammals are both us and not-us; that is why we employ them.170 Thus she disputes her own hypothesis that since humans and mice share genes, a history and work sites, we remain relationally interdependent in the postmodern world. She, in fact, returns to the heritage of modern discourse that philosophically legitimated and set into practice the role of humans as ‘murderers’. Experimental research upon animals for human medical welfare


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is a practice that humans are capable of and may bring rewards for the prolongation of life and reduced suffering of humans at the expense of others’ lives and suffering and this is a responsibility that should not be taken lightly, nor for granted, if we are to consciously fulfil our human capabilities. The ethical restrictions grounding existent political boundaries are incommensurable with the boundlessness and inclusivity of humanity’s metaphysical dimensions, potentially,171 as well as the ecological whole. Furthermore, separation and subordination ‘licenses our tyranny’ cognitively absolving the behaviour of ‘any human intellectual elite to treat the rest of us as trash’.172 For, if environmental ethics is informed by a human discriminatory epistemology it implies aesthetical evaluation of life chances, discriminating against nonhuman animals.173 On the other hand, [a]s we extend the umbrella of moral concern over the rest of nature, we are obliged to do so in a way which recognizes the uniqueness of interests and needs built into each creature’s telos. We do not behave rationally and morally by treating each animal as a little human.174 What these theories demonstrate, above all else, is the cognitive and conceptual intractability of human-centred epistemology, even when it is recognised that from the status quo paradigmatic position political praxis can consequently only be minimally changed. In contrast, Aldo Leopold’s vision of the ‘land ethic’ includes humans as only one part of a community, which also includes animals, plants, the land, and the ecosystem. This holistic understanding of the community implies and incites mutual obligations and common interests. The ultimate ecological grounding of a morally mutual obligation to preserve the totality of the land community renders the language of rights, which reside in humans, obsolete. To permit ‘the freedom of entities to unfold in their own ways’ requires a politicisation of aims that counter the ‘delusion that self-realization lies in the direction of dominating the world and the myriad entities with which we coexist’.175 The intractability of human conceptualisation is an epistemological given that may be transformed; to refute Stephen Clark, it is possible to incorporate ‘clear’ and ‘compendious’ means of articulation that do ‘full justice to the vagaries and unformalizable sensitivities of our [whole] moral experience’.176 The proliferation of literature wherein the moral and political status of nonhuman animals is debated is evidence itself of the increasing political power of the subject of animals. Nevertheless, even if ‘moral philosophers and public opinion agree that it is morally impermissible to be cruel to animals’ whether nonhuman animals have conversely been accorded a greater share of political worth is questionable.177 Indeed, a focus upon animal experimentation brings this point to the fore. Deborah Blum found that it was difficult to mediate the middle ground

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between the polarised camps of animal rights activism and animal experimentation for the epistemological and emotional differences of these two viewpoints were distant even though the ontological subjects remain the one constant factor. Yet, the ensuing dialogue did have real consequences for the subjects concerned.178 It is important to engage in such debates constantly; to morally scrutinise advances in biotechnology – the Onco-mouse, the experimental cloning of Dolly, the ewe, the transplantation of animal organs into humans; to question persistence of modern logic founded upon Cartesian metaphysics. Scientific advancement does not progress with corresponding ethical advancement unless it is purposefully brought to attention. Rather, the reductionist and utilitarianistic attitude towards nonhuman animals is merely given further legitimation as a powerful discourse. Yet, humanity holds the power to form and reform this discourse. This means investigating for example, the pharmaceutical industry’s control on animal experimentation and genetic engineering, which is now proceeding as a ‘growth-orientated technical thrust towards redesigning the gene pool to serve economic criteria’.179 Environmental ethics is a problematic area.180 The porous nature of boundaries, interdependence of concepts, the contingent assignation of inherent worth and ultimate exchange of life resist consistent human moralising.181 Yet, the perception of the animal rights debate and environmental ethics as two discrete philosophical discourses can be resolved politically at the practical level.182 An ecological perspective allows for holistic consideration of various ‘asymmetrical relations’.183 Boundaries are seen as tenuous social creations made by and for the egoism of human life, which leave us with ‘a sense of chill’ ‘as human life grows steadily narrower’.184 For, ultimately, who are we but beings who have lost their animal innocence, grown ashamed of our nakedness and covered in garments of our own making, taking refuge in a world born from ideas that boil forth from our fevered imaginations.185 However, this need for philosophical subtlety should not absolve humanity from responsibility for the consequences of an arrogant and dismissive attitude. Rolston is explicitly unrelenting in this regard: One form of life has never endangered so many others. Never before has this level of question – superkilling by a superkiller – been faced. Humans have more understanding than ever of the speciating process, more predictive power to foresee the intended and unintended results of their actions, and more power to reverse the undesirable consequences. The duties that such power and vision generate no longer attach simply to individuals or persons but are emerging duties to specific forms of life. If, in this world of uncertain moral convictions, it makes any sense to claim that one ought not to kill individuals without justification, it makes


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more sense to claim that one ought not to superkill the species, without superjustification.186 A different attitude is possible. Indeed, values are constantly evolving and a gradual consensus can be seen to be emerging in Western society that considers discriminatory injustice and injury as abhorrent. Inclusion of nonhuman animals within this circle of ethical and political consideration demands further progression. Translated into practice, this would incite vegetarianism at the least. Yet, humans who choose not to eat meat have historically been, and still frequently are, considered to be committing a disturbing and subversive offence.187 Vegetarianism, ‘eating down the hierarchy away from the ambivalent animal power’188 challenges the meat eating ‘habitus’ of Westernised culture189 and all associated practices, such as intensive farming, by disturbing the accepted relationship of utilitarianistic superiority between humans and nonhuman animals within the ecosystem. The consumption of other animals by humans demonstrates a culture that has historically regarded ‘environmental conquest as a laudable feature’.190 This relationship reflects humans’ ambivalent concern for naturalised beings and the ecological world. Yet, it was over a century ago that Charles Darwin decried ‘our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the relations that live around us’ and conceptually resituated the human species, as one of a multitude of organic beings, in relation to the remaining animal species.191 Still much confusion and ignorance remains both ideologically and epistemologically entrenched. In 1855 Chief Seattle warned, ‘Whatever happens to the animals will happen soon also to human beings . . . If all animals ceased to exist, human beings would die of a great loneliness of the soul’. This clear expression of the psychological, as well as ecological interdependence of all animal relations is not befuddled with love or sentiment, but reflects a ‘cultural state of mind’.192 That one particular cultural and temporal ‘state of mind’ has become normalised as universal may be deconstructed by a focus upon subjects other than humans and a review of the legitimating philosophy of Western culture and modern beliefs. These have been seen to be founded upon Baconian notions of progress, where experimentation upon animals and thus denigration of their life, constitutes an extremely important role in underpinning, facilitating, and justifying the machinery of progress with which we are working on our own annihilation . . . [Thus] animal experiments are one of the most political questions . . . To become a radical in this area means to slaughter one of the holiest of cows in modern Western idolatory, the ‘freedom of science’.193 As we found in the preceding chapter the modern form of knowledge that informs politics based upon Cartesian rationality and the independence of

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the human, masculinised mind from the feminised and naturalised social body disputes our essential ecological relations with (other) animals. To regard the animal as the conceptual subject for politicisation troubles this epistemological basis for politicisation. Indeed, to paraphrase Haraway cited at the beginning of this chapter, the nonhuman animal represents a powerful icon of the cultural construction of politics and as such discussion of animals is inherently revolutionary. To recognise animals as our ecological relations requires an expansion of epistemological boundaries. As this genealogical reading of the subject of nonhuman animals has revealed, the modern hold on exclusive human politicisation is being loosened. Yet, as the following chapter illustrates, within humanity differential power relations persist, based upon ethnically and economically mediated epistemological differences; the case of indigenous peoples constitutes the next and final conceptual study to illustrate the emerging possibility of a broadened theorisation of IR on earth.

Notes 1 Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge, p. 10. 2 Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, London: Yale University Press. 3 Midgley, M. (1979) Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd., p. xii. 4 Haraway, (1989) p. 3. 5 Berger, J. (1980) About Looking, London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, p. 3. 6 Baker, S. (1993) Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Here I am borrowing Baker’s observation on grammar but disagreeing with his belief that ‘the animal is necessarily a construction, a representation, and not an accessible essence or reality’, (p. 5). 7 Lipietz, A. (1992) Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. 8 Fox, W. (1990) Toward A Transpersonal Ecology; Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism, London: Shambhala Publications, Inc., p. 13. 9 Fox, (1990) pp. 14–17. This is the position also of Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, London: UCL Press. 10 Barthes, R. (Lavers, A., trans.) (1993) Mythologies. London: Vintage Books, p. 121. 11 Lévi-Strauss, C. (Weightman, J. and Weightman, D., trans.) (1969, first published 1964) The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 341. 12 Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man’s Inhumanity to Animals, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons, p. 7. 13 Cf. Mellor, M. (1996) ‘Myths and Realities: A Reply to Cecile Jackson’, New Left Review, 217, 132–137, who is specifically referring to ecofeminism but recognises the logic’s wider applications. 14 Murdoch, I. (1970) ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, in The Sovereignty of Good, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 15 Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘Politics and Ethics: An Interview’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Middlesex: Penguin Books, pp. 375–376.


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16 Simons, J. (1995) Foucault and the Political, London: Routledge. 17 Norberg-Hodge, H. (1991) Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, London: Rider. 18 Shiva, V. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, London: Zed Books. 19 Gellatley, J., with Tony Ward (1996) The Silent Ark: A Chilling Exposé of Meat – The Global Killer, London: Thorsons, p. 152. 20 Lévi-Strauss, (1969). 21 The term, meat, once referred to any nourishing food and has been narrowed to mean only animal flesh since around the fourteenth century; Fiddes, N. (1991) Meat: A Natural Symbol, London: Routledge, p. 3. 22 Fiddes, (1991). 23 Adams, C. J. (1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. 24 Fiddes, (1991) p. 68. 25 Cf. Heidegger, M. (Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E., trans.) (1962) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 85. 26 Haraway, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, p. 201. 27 Lévi-Strauss, (1969). 28 Adams, (1990) pp. 40–42. 29 Bennett, J. and Chaloupka, W. (1993) ‘TV Dinners and Organic Brunch’, in In the Nature of Things, Language, Politics and the Environment, London: University of Minnesota Press, p. viii. 30 Fano, A. (1997) Lethal Laws: Animal Testing, Human Health and Environmental Policy, London: Zed Books Ltd.; Coleman, V. (1994) Betrayal of Trust, Lynmouth, Devon: European Medical Journal. 31 See preface in Fano, (1997). 32 Indeed once a person infiltrates the scientific laboratories or the agricultural laboratories of mass production the horrors that confront them often have a deeply disturbing and politically revolutionising effect; Gellatley, (1996). 33 Sharpe, R. (1988) The Cruel Deception: The Use of Animals in Medical Research, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons Publishers Ltd., pp. 265–266. 34 Coleman, (1994); Sharpe, (1988); Singer, (1975); and Ryder, R. (1971) ‘Experiments on Animals’, in Godlovitch, S., Godlovitch, R. and Harris, J. (eds) Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans, London: Victor Gollancz. 35 Coleman, (1994) p. 108. 36 Fiddes, (1991). 37 Twigg, J. (1983) ‘Vegetarianism and the Meanings of Meat’, in Murcott, A. (ed.) The Sociology of Food and Eating, Aldershot: Gower. 38 Fiddes, (1991). 39 Chapter 2 of Singer, (1975). 40 Quoted by Ferry, L. (Volk, C., trans.) (1995) The New Ecological Order, London: The University of Chicago Press, p. 49. 41 Fano, (1997) pp. 69–74. 42 Ryder, (1971) p. 80. 43 Fano, (1997) p. vii. 44 Fano tells how the EU insists that in vitro tests mimic live testing, thus circumscribing the scientific research, and where results differ the animal results are adopted rather than results garnered from the cultured human tissue. 45 Fano, (1997). 46 Coleman, (1994) chapter 4; Fano, (1997). 47 Cited by Bahro, R. (Tyler, M., trans.) (1986) ‘A Lesson in Compromise: A Green

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Ecological relations: the case of nonhuman animals Animal Protection Law Based on Alternative Concentration Camp Logic?’, in Building the Green Movement, London: G.M.P. Publishers, p. 204. Adams, C. J. (1993) ‘The Feminist Traffic in Animals’, in Gaard, G. (ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Adams (1990). Callicott, J. B. (1980) ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 55. Adams, (1993) p. 197. Polanyi, M. (1958, 1962) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, London: Routledge, p. 385. Spinoza says that it is ‘plain’ knowledge that ‘the law against the slaughtering is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason’. Quoted by Midgley, (1979) p. 351. Also discussed by Adams, (1990) pp. 77–78. Gruen, L. (1993) ‘Dismantling Oppression: An analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals’, in Gaard, G. (ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Adams, (1990). Genesis, quoted by Singer, P. (1985) In Defence of Animals, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., p. 2. Aristotle quoted in Rolston, H. III (1988) Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, p. 45. Quoted by Oelschlaeger, (1991) p. 56. Passmore, J. (1980, 2nd ed.) Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions, London: Duckworth, pp. 21 and 20, respectively. Quoted in Ferry, (1995) p. 22. Spinoza, B. (Curley, E., ed. and trans., with introduction by Hampshire, S.) (1996) ‘Of Human Bondage, or the Powers of the Affects’, Ethics, London: Penguin Books, p. 135. Midgley, M. (1983a) Animals and Why They Matter, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Plutarch (Warner, R., trans. and introduction, with notes by Russel, D. A.) (1971) ‘The Cleverness of Animals’, Moral Essays, Middlesex: Penguin Books, p. 112. Hume quoted by Midgley, (1983a) p. 48 Hume quoted by Midgley, M. (1983b) ‘Duties concerning Islands’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 96. Quoted from Kant’s Lectures on Ethics by Midgley, (1983a) p. 51 (italics in original). Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 512. Passmore, (1980) pp. 123–124. Clark, S. R. L. (1977) The Moral Status of Animals, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 186. Midgley, (1983a) p. 83. Hobbes’ Leviathan quoted by Midgley, (1983a) p. 85. Eckersley, R. (1995) ‘Liberal Democracy and the Rights of Nature: The Struggle for Inclusion’, Environmental Politics 4 (4), 169–198, p. 177. Rolston, (1988) p. 48. Also Rolston H. III (1994) Conserving Natural Value, Chichester: Colombia University Press, ch. 4. Feinberg, J. (1976) ‘Can Animals Have Rights’, in Regan, T. and Singer, P. (eds) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, Inc., p. 195. Birch, T. H. (1993) ‘Moral Considerability and Universal Consideration’, Environmental Ethics, 15 (4), 313–332, pp. 316–317. Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, London: Allen Lane, p. 301. Singer, (1975). Berger, (1980).


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77 Galaty, J. (1995) ‘Dreams, symbols and totems’, New Internationalist, 266, 28–29. 78 For a discussion of totemism see Lévi-Strauss, C. (Needham, R., trans., with introduction by Poole, R. C., 1969, first published in 1962) Totemism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 79 Darwin, C. (1921, 6th ed.; 1st ed., 1859–60) The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London: Watts and Co. 80 Ferry, (1995). 81 Benton, T. and Redfearn, S. (1996) ‘The Politics of Animal Rights – Where is the Left?’, in New Left Review, 215, 43–58, p. 49. 82 Midgley, (1979) pp. 25–27. 83 Gellatley, (1996) ch. 5. 84 Ferry, (1995). 85 Midgley, (1983a) p. 9. 86 Baker, (1993). 87 Passmore, (1980) p. 114. 88 Montaigne in Regan and Singer, (1976) p. 83. 89 Schopenhauer in Regan and Singer, (1976) p. 125. 90 Midgley, (1979) p. xvi. 91 Quoted in Ferry, (1995) p. 4. 92 Both quotes from Ferry, (1995) p. 45. 93 Ferry, (1995) p. 46. 94 Taylor, P. W. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 95 Darwin, C. (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray. 96 Passmore, (1980) p. 115. 97 Salt, H. (1976) ‘Animals’ Rights’, in Regan and Singer. 98 Treasurer and Honorary Secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society. 99 Coleridge, S. (1900) ‘The Administration of the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876’. Reprinted from the Fortnightly Review March 1900, London: Chapman and Hall Ltd. 100 See the excerpt by John Stuart Mill, ‘A defense of Bentham’ in Regan and Singer, (1976) pp. 131–132. 101 Jeremy Bentham, (1789) Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17. Frequently and variously quoted including in Regan and Singer, (1976) p. 130; Singer, (1975) p. 8 and Singer (1993), pp. 56–57. 102 Singer, P. (1993, 2nd ed.) Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Singer, (1975). 103 Singer in Regan and Singer, (1976) p. 154. 104 Ryder, (1971). 105 Richard Adams, in reviewing this book, says it is a ‘most important and responsible work’ (back cover of 2nd ed.). 106 Singer in Regan and Singer, (1976) p. 148. 107 Regan quoted by Rolston, H. III (1985) ‘Duties to Endangered Species’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 69. 108 Regan, T. (1984) The Case for Animal Rights, London: Routledge, p. 399. 109 Regan, (1984) p. 330. 110 Regan in Singer, (1985) p. 14. 111 Regan in Regan and Singer, (1976). 112 Feinberg, J. (1974) ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’, in Blackstone, W. T. (ed.) Philosophy of Environmental Crisis, Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 55–56. 113 Rodman, J. (1977) ‘The Liberation of Nature?’, Inquiry, 20, 83–145, p. 94.

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114 Rollin, B. E. (1990) The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 269. 115 Cheney, J. (1987) ‘Eco-Feminism and Deep Ecology’, Environmental Ethics, 9, 115–145, pp. 143–144. 116 Cf. Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism, London: Cassell. 117 Blum, D. (1994) The Monkey Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 29. 118 Fouts was a research student with Allen and Beatrice Gardner, psychologists at the University of Nevada, where he bonded with Washoe, who has stayed with him throughout his career. (The Fouts now have 5 chimpanzees trained in human sign language.) The Gardners were the first to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee, Washoe, although this had been suggested by the primatologist, Robert Yerkes in Almost Human in 1925. ‘Penny’ Patterson at the University of Oklahoma has taught ASL to Koko and Michael, two gorillas; Lana, a chimp has been taught a computerised language by Duane Rumbaugh at the Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University. 119 For example, Washoe’s interpretation of Coca Cola as ‘sweet water’. 120 Examples given at www.gettysburg.edu/~arterber/psy101/lang1.html (accessed 28.4.98); for paintings by Koko and Michael see www.gorilla.org/index/.html (accessed 28.4.98); Blum (1994). 121 On Monday 27 April 1998 at 7 p.m. EDT Koko (a gorilla) hosted a live chat on the world wide web at www.envirolink.org. Deborah Fouts at Central Washington University organises regular chimposiums; see www.cwu.edu /~cwuchci/chimposium.html. 122 Rolston, (1985) p. 70. 123 Rolston, (1988) p. 70. 124 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a researcher with over two decades of experience on language acquisition by apes, quoted by Seabrook, C. ‘Nearly Human? New Rights for Apes Urged (Moral and Legal Debate)’, at www.arrs.envirolink.org/ ar-voices/nearly.html (accessed 28.4.98). 125 For example, African elephants have declined from 1.3 million in 1979 to between 286,000 and 580,000 in 1990, black Rhinoceros numbers have dropped from 65,000 in 1907 to 2,400 in 1995, white rhinos in Zaire declined from 2,000 in 1970 to just 17 in 1984, and a total tiger population of around 100,000 is thought to have declined to approximately 5,000. This is just a sample of figures published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, in McGregor, L., (20 May 1997) ‘Last Call for Jumbo’ The Guardian (G2), p. 3. For a critical evaluation of Cites, see Princen, T. (1994) ‘The Ivory Trade Ban: NGOs and International Conservation’ in Princen, T. and Finger, M. Environmental NGOs in World Politics: Linking the Local and the Global, London: Routledge. 126 See the chronology provided by Porter, G. and Welsh Brown, J. (1991) Global Environmental Politics, Oxford: Westview Press. 127 Seager, J. with Reed, C. and Stott, P. (1995) The State of the Environment Atlas, London: Penguin Books Ltd., pp. 76–77 and 123–124. These figures, as Joni Seager points out, are not even good guesses, such is our ignorance of the rich density of life forms. 128 Cockburn, A. (1996) ‘A Short, Meat-Oriented History of the World. From Eden to the Mattole’, New Left Review, 215, 16–42, p. 34. 129 Gellatley, (1996) p. 154. 130 Fiddes, (1991) p. 215. 131 Spencer, C. (1993) The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, London: Fourth Estate, p. 332. 132 This is not to mention the consequences of chemical growth promotion that


133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171

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have had adverse effects on the health of animals, the ecosystem and human consumers. Rolston, (1988). Ferry, (1995) pp. 35–36. Rodman, (1977) p. 89. Fox quoted by Devall, B. and Sessions, G. (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., p. 66. Devall and Sessions, (1985) p. 68. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 224–225. Naess, A. (Rothenberg, D., trans. and ed.) (1989) Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 171. Naess, A. (1973) ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary’, Inquiry, 16 (1), 95–100, pp. 96 and 95 respectively. Benton, T. (1993) Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice, London: Verso. Rolston, (1988) p. 153. Rolston, (1988) p. 72. Midgley, (1983a) p. 111. Cf. Agar, N. (1995) ‘Valuing Species and Valuing Individuals’, Environmental Ethics, 17 (4), 397–416. Gellatley, (1996). Adams, (1990). Deudney, D. (1996) ‘Ground Identity: Nature, Place and Space in Nationalism’, in Lapid, Y. and Kratochwil, F. (eds) The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, p. 129. Bennett and Chaloupka, (1993) p. xvi. Callicott, (1980) p. 58. Callicott, (1980) p. 51. Eckersley, (1995) p. 190. Rolston, (1994) p. 110. Rolston, (1985) pp. 63 and 75, respectively. Rolston, (1988) pp. 66 and 72, respectively (my italics). Rolston, (1988) p. 67. Norton, B. G. (1987) Why Preserve Natural Variety? Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 124–127. Norton, (1987); Rolston, (1985). Ferry, (1995). Quoted by Ferry, (1995) p. 4. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 191–192. Rodman, (1977) p. 118. Ferry, (1995) p. 21. Midgley, (1983b) p. 101. Clark, (1977) p. 193. Bramwell, A. (1989) Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History, London: Yale University Press, p. 63, emphasis in the original. Baker, (1993) p. x. Ferry, (1995) p. xiii. Ferry, (1995) p. 56. Haraway, D. J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse_: Feminism and Technoscience, London: Routledge, pp. 78–79 and 82. Cf. Midgley, (1983a); Midgley, (1983b).

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172 Clark, (1977) p. 182. 173 Sober, E. (1986) ‘Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism’, in Elliot, R. (ed.) (1995) Environmental Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 174 Rollin, (1990) p. 269. 175 Fox, (1990) p. 268. 176 Clark, (1977) p. 186. 177 Passmore, J. (1975b) ‘The Treatment of Animals’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (2), 195–218, p. 195. 178 Blum, (1994). 179 Roger Shinn cited by Hessell, D. T. (1993) ‘Now that Animals can be Genetically Engineered: Biotechnology in Theological-Ethical Perspective’, in Gottlieb, R. S. (ed.) This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, London: Routledge, p. 631. 180 See in particular Regan T. (1981) ‘The Nature and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic’, Environmental Ethics, 3, 19–34, for a discussion of the difficulty involved in reaching agreement upon location of inherent value as the basis for ecological equivalence to life and the foundation for an environmental ethic. 181 Singer, (1975). 182 Hargrove, E. C. (1992) ‘Preface. Animal Welfare Ethics “versus” Environmental Ethics: The Problem of Sentient Life’, in The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, Albany: State University of New York Press. 183 Midgley, (1983 b) p. 92. 184 Cf. Midgley (1979) ‘The Egoist’s Blind Alley’, p. 351. 185 Oelschlaeger, (1991) p. 353. 186 Rolston, (1985) pp. 68–69. 187 Spencer, (1993). 188 Twigg, (1983) p. 27. 189 Fiddes, (1991) borrows the term ‘habitus’ from Bourdieu to illustrate the normalcy of meat eating, p. 5. 190 Fiddes, (1991) p. 228. 191 Darwin, (1921) p. 10. 192 Bahro, (1986) pp. 205–206. 193 Bahro, (1986) p. 202.

6

Ecological relations The case of indigenous peoples

This chapter presents the final case-area: indigenous peoples. Just as gender and speciesism have been used as discriminating concepts to deny political presence, so too has ethnicity served as a differentiating factor upon which politicisation can be naturalised and hierarchically mediated, particularly when ethnic difference is reinforced by global economic disparity. Indigenous peoples may be defined as descendants of a country prior to its enclosure as a state.1 Thus, conceptual inclusion in a social science that has been constructed upon statist discourse logically circumscribes the integral identity of indigenous peoples. Resistance of the term, indigenous, to universally accepted definition2 is partly a reflection of its linguistic imposition from external sources3 and, partly, a reflection of the cultural and ecological specificity of the peoples.4 The contingent nature of political praxis arising from this second factor does not align itself with the prevailing, singular Western logos. Instead, respect for the pluralistic diversity of local conditions requires recognition that there does not necessarily exist internal equity within indigenous communities, nor that indigenous peoples lead mysterious, romantic existences. Indigenous peoples account for only around 200 million or 4 per cent of the global population;5 in some areas of the world this number is increasing.6 However, they represent 90–95 per cent of the world’s cultural diversity based upon their distinct socio-cultural ways of interacting with their environment.7 Indigenous communities are predominantly found within the tropics, a mere 7 per cent of the earth, where between half and three-quarters of the world’s biodiversity is also found. As a consequence, indigenous peoples possess a wealth of knowledge of local flora and fauna, of micro-climatic, topographical and soil conditions and have a history of co-existing in a sustainable way with their environment.8 The World Commission on Environment and Development has said, ‘larger society . . . could learn a great deal from their traditional skills in sustainably managing very complex ecological systems’. However, in practice, as ‘formal development reaches more deeply into rain forests, deserts, and other isolated environments, it tends to destroy the only cultures that have proved able to thrive in these environments’.9

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The Western notion of an abstract, self-constituted individual rationalising a life-trajectory based upon utilitarian principles to advance his rights and further his own ends is alien to indigenous peoples. Rather, indigenous people define themselves as a community in relation to their land on the basis of the perceived inseparability of these two concepts – land and identity.10 Ladakhis, for example, do not have surnames, but rather are known by their house name and village. This intimate relationship between self and land constitutes a fundamental cause of socio-economic and political exclusion; not only are indigenous peoples often geographically isolated but they are also socially marginalised, residing in culturally discrete communities that have maintained a way of life in distinct harmony with their local ecosystem. Furthermore, their home is often on land that is, itself, of marginal quality.11 Because indigenous peoples share a world-view of deep reverence for nature that emanates from a custodial understanding of the land and the earth’s resources with which they interact as one life-force amongst the whole living entity12 they are considered outside the remits of Enlightenment-conceived political philosophy. As such these depoliticised subjects have become naturalised as of subordinate status. Political insignificance is further confirmed by the dominant Western view of economic worth on the basis that they contribute little, if anything, to national wealth and global corporations. Indeed, the metatheoretical base of IR cannot epistemologically perceive ‘the poor’; empirically, in terms of economic significance they are worthless, thus constructed as politically powerless and objectified according to Western and universalised norms.13 The consequences ensuing from the meeting of indigenous communities with modern state forces often translate into violent suppression of their difference, which in turn becomes a defining characteristic of their being.14 For their energies become preoccupied with rejection of an external identity being imposed upon them, replacing the positive pursuit of self-determination. The fundamentals of life and the historically adapted survival strategies of a local context are an essential part of the cultural identity of a community.15 The depoliticisation of indigenous people, who actively know and struggle in a powerfully charged political arena for recognition as worthy political subjects, is the subject of this chapter; they are subjects who refuse to regard their ecological context as secondary, but as intimately and fundamentally the base of their lives and culture. Their experiences reveal that political marginalisation may be interpreted as a site of repression but also as a site of resistance.16 By opening up the frame of reference to include alternative, differing ontological foundations and epistemological perspectives, it is hoped that unjust discriminatory barriers will be conceptually and actually dissipated to allow for a holistic revisioning of political theorisation to include all relations of earth. Following the organising Foucauldian frame this chapter proceeds from a description of the epistemological objectification and political infantalisation of indigenous peoples whose life-styles and values do not rely upon


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distancing themselves from their ecological context. The second step shows how this is made possible: the practices that reify and reinforce the epistemological mutation of these relations and their political marginalisation. Third, the ‘subjects’ of this study may be seen as reasserting their worth as self-autonomous political agents whose knowledge matters too. Finally, the power of indigenous peoples, individually and collectively, is hypothesised to have intricately dense and infinite possibilities for political retheorisation with material consequences that could improve the lives of many who suffer now. Nevertheless, this power is recognised to be mediated, indeed compromised, through its struggle against vested and universalised Western economics.

The objectification of indigenous peoples: life, language and labour Life The objectification of indigenous people is easily identified as a means of asserting political power via the categorisation of race. Throughout history the sciences constructed non-white peoples as ‘ “primitives,” more closely connected to the apes than the white “race.” . . . Black people were the beast . . .’17 The ‘beast’ who must scratch the earth and hope for rains in order to grow their own food, must gather wood or dung to cook it, must build their own homes with bamboo or sticks of sorghum dabbed with mud and must try to keep out mosquitoes by engulfing them with smoke from the cooking hearth.18 The emphasis upon the primitive existence of peoples, whose lives are sustained in close proximity to nature and in conditions of extreme material poverty, distances them from the life experiences of Westerners, more so than from their commonality with animals. This gulf in epistemological perception is constituted by the biased, Eurocentric recitation of human advancement. Indigenous peoples are epistemologically overlooked and objectively lumped together as of, or closer to, the animal world. Instead, criteria such as global economic imperatives are sanctified and upheld by state violence, which, in the name of universal civilisation, inhumanely overlooks the welfare of the marginalised. Objectification and subsequent denial of rights eases the process of elimination and/or dismissal; the former Chief of the Narmada Valley Development Agency said: No trauma could be more painful for a family than to get uprooted from a place where it has lived for generations . . . Yet the uprooting has to be

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples done. Because the land occupied by the family is required for a development project which holds promise of progress and prosperity for the country and people in general. The family getting displaced thus makes a sacrifice . . . so that others may live in happiness and be economically better off.19

Up to one third of all rural people in developing countries, 40 per cent in Latin America have been dispossessed of their land, of the harvest of that land and thus the capability to grow foods, by multinational companies in collaboration with state governments desperate to earn foreign currency with which to repay national debts.20 If not physically displaced, the local ecosystem and lives of the indigenous people are irreparably disturbed. This leads to the annihilation of lives. In Ecuador, the population of the Cofan peoples of the rainforest has been cut from an estimated 70,000 to 3,000 over the last generation as a result of local impoverishment, pollution and infestation.21 It has been established that in Brazil one Indian tribe every year since 1900 has vanished.22 As the foundations of life are destroyed, so are the lives of people extinguished. This is not only a phenomenon of lesser-developed states. In the US, native American lands have been mined for uranium and have been the test sites for nuclear weapons for decades. As a result water resources are contaminated and children play on radioactive waste.23 Elites throughout the world use the same terminology to legitimise the control of the lives of ‘others’. Speaking from within the sovereign state, such actions are justified as a means of improving the life experiences of the nation; all within is ‘ours’ to do with as we wish: ‘After all, it is situated in our territory’.24 State sovereignty is a totalising concept overriding the sovereignty of communities. For the many indigenous communities who follow ways of living that are in harmony with their environment and out of step with modern notions of living and self-identification, disdain may be translated into political disenfranchisement. Brazilian Indians were legally disenfranchised until 1988 and considered legal minors on the grounds of supposed incapability of understanding state procedures. Until 1985 Brazil had denied there were people living in the forests;25 in fact fifteen million people live in the Amazonias.26 Similarly, the Indonesian Forestry Minister has said that ‘in Indonesia the forest belongs to the state and not to the people’, that is, not to the 30 to 40 million people who directly rely upon the forest for their subsistence. Instead they are criminalised as unauthorised occupiers.27 In Thailand hill tribes have been forcibly excluded, at gunpoint, not just from national territory but also from national politics; they were considered illegal squatters on their land. Labelling these non-citizens as ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ reveals not only prejudice but also suspicion towards a way of life that is not (inter)dependent upon the state. Policies designed to sever ‘isolated and alien peoples’, as they are known in Indonesia, from customary life-styles are pursued before enfranchisement.28 Hence, the

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 181 Rousseauian notion of education for political citizenship ensures assimilation of ‘undeveloped’ cultures into the hegemonic and global definition of what is political. The presumption of the infantalisation of indigenous peoples is fundamental to political subordination and associated activities.29 So opposition to state programmes of rapid ‘development’, where, for example, dams are hailed as ‘the temples of modern India’, is equated with anti-nationalism and anti-progress. Criticism is dismissed, particularly if articulated by the economically and politically impoverished. The poor are the unfortunate ‘some’ who ‘will have to bear the cost of “development” and will not be allowed to invoke the ‘‘primitive” past’.30 Political practices of violence against those communities ‘least able to resist their advances, where land rights are often least developed’ have become routine.31 Communal rights to land are not respected in the individualist discourse of modern politics, where ownership and rights, following Locke, are only accorded to named individuals. Following on from this premise is the assumption that indigenous peoples’ knowledge of land use and crop cultivation is limited, certainly inferior to universalisable, Western understandings. Hence the Green Revolution promoted in developing countries from the 1960s usurped indigenous practices of food production that ensured the wellbeing of local communities and constantly renewed the fertility of the fields. Instead, a paradigm of food production focused upon the creation of cash in external markets, based upon the growth of crops grown from foreign seeds, dependent upon inputs of artificial fertilisers and pesticides and reliant upon a mechanised system of farming has resulted in the impoverishment of life, actually – in the form of increased famine and associated destitution and fatalities – and culturally – in the form of undermining and destroying alternative ways of living in harmony with local conditions.32 The financial costs of these alien practices ensure indebtedness to external monetary creditors and undermine the traditional knowledge and skills of the farmer, inducing feelings of powerlessness. Thus not only are the abundant capabilities of the land reduced to a monocultural harvest, but also the richness of the indigenous grower’s local wisdom is discontinued as both biological diversity and cultural diversity become streamlined according to the demands and vagaries of the external market. Such industrialisation of food production, whereby seeds and knowledges are artificially stunted, can be said to be revolutionising life: objectivising it to a new print of no return.33 Furthermore, this method of food production has intensified the problem of inequitable distribution so that malnutrition has become more pervasive; local growers are losing the ability to sustain life.34 This appropriation of life has been termed the second wave of colonisation, succeeding slavery. The imperialist control of life, which amounts to a ‘lifedestroying paradigm’, can also be seen within the inherently reductionist discourse of ‘scientific’ forestry; dismissive of the forests’ organic diversity and diverse roles, it underpins the commercialisation of forestry according to market rationale which sets about destroying biological and ecosystemic

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diversity, transforming a forest from a renewable resource to a non-renewable mine, laying to waste all ‘dispensable’ ‘pre-modern’ peoples’ perspectives and life-styles that had hitherto protected a ‘life-enhancing paradigm’.35 Along with the development in biotechnological engineering of seeds and crops and exclusive patenting of these food stuffs by multinational corporations that wrench control of farming practices from local growers,36 is another new development: the genetic mapping of humanity; together these two phenomena constitute ‘the third wave of colonization’ whereby the focus is upon the ‘raw material’ of life.37 This most recent process of indexing indigenous peoples in an objective fashion is the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). This is a project that aims to catalogue the genetic constitution of the peoples of the world to illustrate the global variation of humanity. Once collected, the genetic samples taken could become the property of commercial industries, just as threatened plant and animal species have been catalogued, and may be patented, furthering the objectification of ‘endangered’ indigenous populations, without addressing the reasons for their cultural demise.38 Such a project reveals the contradictory logic of, on the one hand, sacrilegiously taking a scraping of life from indigenous people as an experimental object, and, on the other hand, valuing their difference. This is the same logic as that of animal experimentation: questions of common humanity have been reduced to an interest in possession by dominant members of global society. Once again, indigenous peoples are being objectified and the sacred has been given commodity value in the global market. The objectification of the life of indigenous peoples is a social construction by those with the power to determine and define epistemological understandings: language is a powerful discourse shaping life, as the next section will reveal. Language The power of language to objectify is demonstrated vividly in this following quotation: By definition peasants are concerned with land, with water, with pastures and animals, thus with the local. The national is usually beyond their immediate frame of reference and action . . . while at the local level relations of power, control make immediate sense . . . [They] are used to a dependent relationship – with nature, with the state and its authority, and with the ‘big people’ . . . those who know, who have seemingly unlimited resources . . . By necessity peasants will attempt to avoid ‘problems’ and conflicts, and seek accommodation rather than confrontation. Peasants’ consciousness of time . . . [is] an immutable fact beyond their control. Each action of humankind and nature will come at its time and there is not much to be done about this . . . [C]onsciousness of the past extends far back and affects in many ways their present actions, decisions and

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 183 behaviour, their perspective of the future tends to be short: relevant time spans are agricultural seasons or the gestation period of animals.39 Only by Western, modern definition can indigenous peoples’ identities and activities become so belittled or ‘peasantized’40 because the discourse is implicitly exclusionary. The Western system of knowledge devalues and dismisses that which it cannot appropriate; so ‘ecosystem people’,41 who are largely dependent upon their immediate ecosystem for subsistence, constitute the objects of ‘systematic exclusion and dependency’ and thereby ‘a priority “target” of clientele for many outside agents and interlocutors’42 within a global economic paradigm. To define native peoples as ‘our’ ‘stone-age’, ‘primitive remnants’ enables the hypothesis that they have nothing to contribute in the contemporary period and legitimates a paternalistic political relationship.43 Dr Savyasaachi tells of the Koitors, known by outsiders as the Hill Maria tribe, whose dialect is not accredited with intelligence, but rather is disregarded as a minority language of ‘the defeated’, because the Koitors’ world-view does not coincide with the normalised conception of a political territory but is constituent of ‘the universe of plants, animals, trees and human beings’. In fact, they are cognisant of the undermining of their way of life and foresee its demise as shifting cultivation is superseded by settled rice cultivation.44 This story demonstrates that where there is translation, cultural and literal, of foreign systems of knowledge, it is invariably partial, so that an indigenous episteme is reduced according to Western comprehension and often returned to indigenous communities in a perverted form.45 Semantically and politically, the Koitor tribe, as many others, is denied equivalent sovereignty by Westerners whose reproduction of the Koitors’ existence via language translates into a form of delegitimation of their very being, irrespective of the Koitors’ realities. Thus, form and activity is made contingent upon one cultural representation: Backward. Heathen. Things of the dark. Those are some of the labels he (the white man) gave all things essentially us. The things that defined our uniqueness. In time we learnt to hate them ourselves. To scorn those who adhered to them, who refused to ‘go with the times’.46 As this quotation illustrates, language may be a totalising, normalising social system. Indeed, language is a social institution that is constantly reified according to the significant values of the collective. When written it crystallises social norms and is privileged over speech, obscuring the contingent specificity of language.47 Consider the language used to tell the emergence of opposition to statefunded monocultural forest plantations by ‘tribals armed with bows and arrows’ who felled ‘alien’ trees and simultaneously requested mixed species

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more applicable to local conditions.48 The reaction of these ‘tribals’ disturbs the commentator and reluctantly it is conceded that while the peasant operates in a world largely composed of ‘illiterates’, and consequently many peasant movements lack a written manifesto, his [sic] actions are imbued with a certain rationality and internally consistent system of values.49 The patronising supposition that ecosystem people do not comprehend and therefore do not consciously regulate a balance between their activities and the resources of their environments arises when it is presumed that they are instead governed by a mixture of social and supernatural forces where, the balance between human populations and the resources of their environments is not maintained through conscious decision or overall awareness on the part of individuals. Rather an intricate pattern of behaviour, strongly reinforced by religious belief and social pressure, governs the relationship with nature for the individual, without he or she having conscious knowledge of why a particular action at a particular time is required or forbidden . . . a nature-spirit-culture triangle develops in which each side reinforces the other and together determine the actions of individuals and groups.50 It is not difficult to understand how sympathetic anthropological critique can be used against indigenous peoples to the point where they are considered of inconsequential and tiresome significance. So, as in the past when worthless trinkets were given to indigenous people in exchange for the riches of their land by Western exploiters, the attitude and corresponding discourse persists as legitimate and beyond reproach. The inegalitarian nature of discussions remains. For example, government officials seizing tribal lands in Orissa, India, supported by the police and the state’s legal mechanisms pronounced: ‘[y]ou people are primitive and uncivilized. You do shifting cultivation . . . We will raise tea plantations in the area, you will get employment and in the process get civilized’. The fate of the lands was wrenched from the tribal peoples’ control by alien bureaucrats who ‘employed soil scientists to test the suitability of the soil for tea plantations’, but it did not employ ‘anthropologists to test if tea plantations [would] take root in the minds and hearts of the people’.51 Development discourse has allowed the presentation of economically impoverished, geographically marginalised peoples as ‘the half-human, halfcultured benchmark against which the Euro-American world measures its achievements’ to go largely unquestioned.52 Conservationists also, by failing to acknowledge that tropical forests are cleared primarily for commercial interests, implicitly condone the universalised epistemology of capitalist development.53 Thus, shifting cultivation is considered wasteful of natural

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 185 resources and injurious to ‘natural’ regeneration; no regard is paid to the forest’s role as a vital universe to local communities. It is for this reason that rubber tappers in the Amazonia are highly suspicious of gringos ecologistas who it seems ‘would rather see the Amazon preserved as a kind of giant botanical garden or bird sanctuary than filled with healthy, well-fed humans’.54 A prerequisite of shifting agriculture, which is increasingly difficult to find, is a low population density. This factor undermines its ecologically benign nature and is focused upon by global critics, despite the gulf of difference in land use by shifting farmers compared with commercial crop producers.55 The way of life actively constructed around this ecologically-sensitive cultivation practice is dismissed.56 In practice, shifting cultivation is a term that covers a multiplicity of forms and intricate dynamics, demonstrating both a clear understanding of habitat and accumulation of knowledge that belie any notion of ‘backwardness’.57 In fact, clearance of vegetation for settled cultivation is not infrequently, ecologically, the worst possible option. Not only is soil fertility undermined and erosive processes instigated, the effects of which increase cumulatively, but also deforestation may have regional hydrological consequences.58 Indeed, the origin of the notion that shifting cultivation was ecologically destructive ‘developed during British rule [in India] because the practice destroyed what the colonial rulers saw as valuable timber resources’.59 Presenting shifting cultivation as ‘unplanned, aimless, nomadic, unproductive and uneconomical in the utilization of land and labor and destructive of the environment’ allows for the unbroken persistence of the objectification of indigenous people’s activities and identities. The state’s reliance upon such a colonialist discourse epistemologically ignores existing cultural arrangements and ecological constraints and reflects the interests of powerful foreigners, against which shifting cultivators can only vainly protest.60 There is evidently a political motive for blaming poverty with ecological destruction, for the frugal life-styles of the ‘poor’ peoples of the world ensures the persistence of diverse ecosystems and actively sustains resources;61 in effect, their sensitive management of their ecological context enriches the global environment. But the economically poor communities whose funds are their local ecological and cultural reserves, rather than foreign, distant monetary banks, regulated according to universalisable, abstract phenomena are marginalised and disempowered. Indeed, the notion of ‘poverty’ is a relatively recent ‘discovery’ premised on a culturally-specific understanding. So enabling the universalised discourse of ‘development’ to be the panacea to the 1.5 billion constantly hungry people of the world. This ‘politics of poverty’ regards the poor as ‘objects of knowledge and management’ to be reformed and transforms society in accordance with the dictates of globalised capitalist forms of production.62 So discourse manipulates life. The terms: ‘less developed’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘developing’ and ‘Third World’ all reveal the inherent presumption of teleology.63

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Development politics also invariably conceives indigenous people en masse.64 This conceptual reduction of the diverse plurality of peoples is a prerequisite for the singular understanding of food production. Objectification of indigenous producers enables usurpation of autonomy. In practice this means capital-intensive methods of farming completely foreign to local conditions.65 This is authorised by distant global financial institutions where the rhetoric of political economy cannot be experienced, nor challenges may be heard.66 The emphasis on economic and technological restructuring, even if recognised to have social consequences, renders the debate abstract and absolves the decision-makers from considering the recipients’ reaction too closely. Having to live these theories, indigenous people, not surprisingly, scorn contemptuously the ‘superior’ knowledge of the ‘experts’. Thus the moral high ground is claimed by both: both sides can arrogantly refuse to listen and co-operate, assuming there is a common language, a shared notion of the meaning of judicious environmental management and equitable conditions for dialogue.67 Further, assertion of the need to work within the state apparatus structurally discriminates against the input of indigenous voices, even if this view is tempered by a caution towards scientific jargon. Gadgil and Guha, whilst acknowledging the capabilities of indigenous people in creating change over short time scales, argue that only by framing indigenous peoples’ claims according to the determinants of ‘modern science and technology’ will the wider dimensions and long-term implications of a local issue be perceived. However, even this middle way persists in constraining and controlling ‘folk knowledge’ whilst giving the illusion of permitting some involvement in decision-making.68 As Stacy Pigg finds in her anthropological study of the Bikas of Nepal, the ‘ignorance’ does not lie with the local people, rather it lies with those ‘[p]eople who work in development . . . [who] tell each other and foreign visitors that the villagers are the problem’.69 Thus ensues a ‘dialogue of elites’ which excludes local participation. Even within recipient countries elites do not actually talk to people on the ground. Such WaBenzi (those driving Mercedes Benz) have more in common with their World Bank counterparts than indigenous people within the same state.70 This matters when discourse transforms lives. The gulf in life-experiences means that development planners frequently find it difficult to shake off notions of paternalism or are simply sceptical of indigenous peoples ability to manage their land sustainably. So autonomy is removed in a misguided attempt to ‘rescu[e] the “voice” of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time’.71 Whether the motivation is a benign attempt to help the indigenous farmer or autocratic usurpation of autonomy matters little; the net result is the same. Such objectification of people without seeing the violence inherent in suppressing humanity to fit one hegemonic discourse is sanctioned even when contradictory perspectives are acknowledged. Consider the Commission on Global Governance, which in explicitly linking poverty with environmental degradation, is remarkably silent on differing global rates of consumption but confusedly notes:

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 187 Poor people press on the land and forests, over-exploiting them to survive and undermine the resource base on which their well-being and survival depend. These countries must be helped to climb out of poverty and so ease pressure on their habitat. But as they become less poor, their living standards and therefore consumption levels will rise.72 To misperceive the incomparable differences in resource consumption and environmental degradation renders it easy to relocate the blame, irrespective of the evidence.73 In obfuscating the dynamics of ecological and cultural erosion so are the ontological struggles to maintain a livelihood similarly disregarded and easily discredited. Labour A focus upon labour identifies the prerequisite condition of integration within the monetised, capitalist economy before political inclusion is permitted. The belief that subsistence forms of land-use are wasteful by virtue of their non-contribution to state revenues sanctions appropriation of the labour of indigenous peoples. For it is seen that the monetised economy is irrelevant and capitalist interactions with external markets are of little, if any, significance to subsistence producers. The state, as part of the global economy, is interested in changing this situation, in order to improve its economic power, by bringing the labour of indigenous peoples into the remit of capitalist relations and only then will indigenous peoples become identified as political subjects. Until then the labour of indigenous people is regarded as worthless, in spite of the subsistence value it provides for the community and its noncontribution to levels of pollution and destruction. The labour of indigenous peoples is also scorned by Westerners on account of its relative lack of technological input. The use of animals and co-operation between families to work the land and provide for the community without the need of sophisticated equipment, let alone capital-intensive machinery, is belittled; that the physical terrain is not suitable for mechanisation and the ecological integrity of the land is maintained through not succumbing to a Westernised, chemical-intensive form of agriculture is viewed as a ‘primitive’ way to labour. It is also forgotten that the introduction of mechanisation fractures social relations, often imposing an inhuman work pace and frequently alienates the labourer from his/her produce. So sharing resources and labour is regarded as pre-modern, hence backward, even of a communist inclination and hence politically backwards, when considered in comparison with the norms of individualism and privatisation. Indigenous practices of farming are based upon a respect of mutual reciprocity between human society and the earth. It will give a harvest in return for diligent care in sustaining the fertility of the land: food provides a conceptual focus for seeing the circularity of ecological relations and labour is the physical activity that makes this possible. This view contrasts with the

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abstraction and objectification of labour as seen by developers, whereby development programmes are devised according to extrapolative methods from one specific culture. World Bank programmes that aim to raise the economic performance of states have been imposed upon subsistence farmers, considered to have low rates of productivity.74 For ‘[p]roductivity, viewed from the perspective of survival, differs fundamentally from the dominant view of the productivity of labour as defined for processes of capital accumulation’.75 Accordingly, these farmers are not uncommonly required to divert their energies to the production of foods that are alien to the local subsistence economy for export to distant economies. In the process, their labour becomes divorced from local, culturally and ecologically specific dictates and, instead, is determined by foreign demands. Local autonomy is stolen. This has been termed the second wave of colonisation, for the capital of indigenous communities, the natural ecosystem and social skills are appropriated for and by foreign powers.76 The result is devastating for the physical and social environment and personally: Each time an ecological niche is degraded or its resources appropriated by the more powerful in society, the deprived weaker sections become further impoverished. For instance, the steady destruction of our natural forests, pasture lands and coastal water bodies has not only meant an increased economic poverty for millions of tribals, nomads and fisherfolk, but also a slow cultural and social death: a dismal change from rugged self-sufficient human beings to abjectly dependent landless labourers and urban migrants.77 In Africa, the dispossession of land from the pastoralist people of semi-arid areas of Africa, for commercial beef production by a few individuals with European export markets in sight, has induced passivity amongst the locals as the easiest and safest option in the quest for survival, for they recognise their relative powerlessness in this situation. So they become the economically poor, ‘lazy’ objects of ‘development’: recipients of ‘humanitarian’ aid. In such cases unlawful resistance is a matter of self-reliance.78 The hegemonic discourse of development causes a pauperisation of indigenous peoples and simultaneously dispossesses them of their dignity. This process is not infrequently defended by an invocation of ‘national interest’ that further diminishes indigenous people’s ‘ability to control and gainfully use natural resources’.79 The powerlessness induced in indigenous communities has promoted divisions between men and women.80 In traditional communities gender-specific roles were often recognised yet both men and women contributed their labour to the family and community.81 In contrast, indigenous communities are being socially split so that it becomes the sole responsibility of the women (aided by her children and the elderly) to provide for the household, whilst the

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 189 male of the family either cultivates crops for the cash economy on the best of the land or leaves the land to work in the cash, as opposed to subsistence, economy.82 The former labourer is regarded as a marginal and therefore is pushed to the margins of available land and beyond public visibility. With differential access to land and control over resources, the value of the labour of those who persist in the subsistence economy is eroded as is the ecosystem and simultaneously the social community is impoverished.83 Thus the cycle of sustainability is pushed into a downward spiral of enmeshed ecological and social destruction by ‘objectivising’ the labour and identity of those working in a subsistence economy. The imposition of an ‘ideological divide between “productive” and “unproductive” work based on market criteria very rapidly unfolds into the contemporary economic crisis in which wealth is no longer linked to work, or the production of goods and services’ for the public of a local region.84 The labouring of indigenous peoples has become objectified and this process is inseparable from the objectification of the people themselves. How this is legitimised and reinforced is the focus of concern of the following section.

The ‘dividing practices’ Although cross-culturally land is perceived as a product of history and its cultural practices, the global superiority of capitalism disregards land use that cannot be quantified monetarily. This is absolved via the disengaged rationality of Western science that separates culture from nature (Chapter 1). Consequently, people who tread reverentially upon the land, acknowledging that interdependence with nature is the axiomatic root to social relations, are patronised as ‘ancient objects’ of this world.85 Furthermore, modern development undermines personal networks within a community by relying upon the centralisation of authority and decision-making, rather than the dispersal of knowledge and power as in traditional societies.86 For example, the commercialisation of agriculture in India has involved the introduction of specifically Western values, creating a distinction between new technical knowledge and indigenous norms that constituted the ‘epistemological fabric of the community’. This creates the potential for grave insecurity, for subsistence knowledge based upon values of co-operation is being lost, alongside the autonomy of the community. The introduction of the significance of cash, as the ‘unprecedented’ ‘key to subsistence’ in this ‘deeply monetized world’ promotes individual competitiveness over community solidarity.87 Modern political rationality is fundamentally informed by a capitalistic notion of individual land ownership. Following this Lockean interpretation, land that is not used productively and efficiently according to the authorities is therefore ‘waste’ and available for appropriation. This includes ubiquitous tracts of common land, which are often the source of indigenous people’s sustenance, autonomy and security. Collective land use and subsistence production are both disregarded. Conversely, for indigenous peoples,

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exclusive enclosure of land is an alienating concept, which may presage land theft and subsequent economic and psychological insecurity, so that situations of landlessness arise in an area where previously the same land had been freely accessible. Common land is the norm among communities in many ‘developing’ regions of the world, yet it is very much the exception to find land held by a group to be legally secure: Few areas of [Amazonian] forest are unused or unclaimed by local communities. Yet the peoples who inhabit the tropical forests are extremely marginalised and politically oppressed. Small in numbers and with little traditional interaction with state systems outside the forests, forest dwellers have thus proved uniquely vulnerable to dispossession and expropriation. Their lack of land security or political strength has meant that the forests that are their traditional preserve have been ill defended against invasion.88 In many Third World countries forest is termed ‘wasteland’ and nominally owned by the state; indigenous peoples are only permitted to continue their traditional land-use practices through negligence on the part of the overstretched state agencies. The granting of property and/or resource allocation rights to outsiders over indigenous communities inevitably creates conflict. This often is at the expense of the local environment for both sides become adamant that they will not be cheated of their share of the ecological pie and become divested of long-term concern for the sustainable use of resources. Consequently, ‘local control, while not necessarily sufficient for environmental protection, is necessary, while under state control the environment necessarily suffers’.89 The parcelling of extensive land into fragmented, individually owned plots undermines the practice of shifting cultivation and intensifies ecological pressure. Limited access is necessarily translated into reduced or cessation of fallow periods. Thus the soil is exhausted and erosion proceeds, leading inexorably to poverty. Economic decline spirals furthering political marginalisation. Since entitlement to land is awarded to those who clear the ‘waste’, it is thereby also purged of former cultural significance as it is appropriated for the cultivation of crops for export.90 The frequently reified authoritative reason against common land use is the Malthusian argument that individuals will maximise personal gains, thereby undermining the ultimate sustainable resource. However the anomalous nature of common land, being neither privately owned nor in public (that is, state) ownership, entails concerted community efforts to ensure equitable entitlements to the common land if social injustices are not to be reproduced, as is not uncommon. The need for co-operation and the common interest in sustaining this resource ensures democratic participation. It is at the moment of land enclosure when differences in social and economic status are legally entrenched and often further widened;91 whereas common land


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provides the momentum for social and political debate.92 Although this does not mean that all decisions are democratically arrived at nor ecologically benign.93 However, common resources require a forum for participation that is historically and culturally of local validity.94 In contrast are the large-scale, capital-intensive projects imposed upon local communities. For example, dams, promoted as ‘temples of progress’ for the advancement of national agriculture and increased harvest yields, are said to promise prosperity for all. However, the reality is often one of sacrifice of lands and communities, accumulative soil erosion, increased water logging and depletion of soil fertility.95 The diverse and effective village-based ‘agro-ecological systems’ of ‘water harvesting’ and associated rights system for maintaining water supplies and sharing it are dismissed, eroding also cultural relations; the village autonomy is diminished and, within it, socio-economic divisions become intensified as rich farmers drill deeper wells for their own exclusive use.96 A further consequence is environmental migration, intensifying the problems of urbanisation. In addition, the state incurs increased foreign indebtedness, which feeds into the ‘wider loss of cultural autonomy, knowledge and power’ for the production of commodities for foreign currency takes precedence over production for local consumption.97 State agencies and international financial institutions promote technocratic land reform programmes often without participation from affected communities. The World Bank’s attitude, in its own words, is that ‘extensive participation . . . can delay decision-making’ since, at times, the communities in question reject the proposed schemes.98 Agricultural programmes advancing intensive land use for the production of high-yielding, high market-value crops utilising modern technologies and affecting a revolution in labour relations only permit limited involvement ‘from below’ merely to defuse social tensions.99 The capability of affected indigenous communities to significantly participate in dialogue is denied; the power ratio is heavily biased. Furthermore, Westernised programmes exacerbate any existing inequalities and introduce new rifts in indigenous societies. In the Sahel of Africa, competition over land between nomadic herders and settled farmers has intensified as the farmers have increasingly encroached upon pastoral lands, enclosing and cultivating it, encouraged by state-sponsored irrigation schemes, producing crops for urban African elites and European markets. Until this occurrence, nomadism had ensured a flexible and sustainable livelihood, with minimal impact upon the environment, in an arid region with erratic and limited rainfalls. In contrast, settled cultivation strips the soil of nutrients and exposes the groundcover to the Saharan wind abetting desertification.100 So indigenous communities can mirror the socio-economic inequalities of wider society; any notion of a homogeneous community needs dispelling. In Kerala, India, a state noted for its successful socialist welfare policies, adivasis (tribal peoples) are still denied any claims to land, despite a Land

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Reform policy, and consequently live in poverty.101 Local elites have arisen by adopting the attitudes and practices of Western values and take the role of intermediaries between the local community and outside institutions.102 These decision makers are invariably men, for men are more prone to be coopted into the global economy.103 Some Western conservationists share the paradigm of exploitation also, ironically. The antipathy, even prejudice, towards indigenous people – farmers, herders, swiddeners and hunters – is demonstrated by those biologists and conservationists whose calls for the protection of areas of wilderness as ‘national parks’ exclude native people on the grounds that they are destructive of biological diversity.104 This may be interpreted as a form of neo-imperialism serving only foreign commercial interests and overriding local values and culture. The discrimination and injustice meted out to indigenous peoples is evident in the case of the Nagarhole National Park in southern Karnataka in India – home to 6,000 tribal people and 40 tigers. The tigers are a protected species and draw much foreign and domestic money and attention. As a consequence, state officials have invited India’s largest hotel chain to build a resort inside the forest and are opening it up to outsiders by building roads into and within the sanctuary. In contrast, the tribal people demand very little from the forest (and of the state). Yet relocation of the tribal people is deemed necessary, despite the co-existence of tribal people and tigers for centuries, on the basis of their presumed compulsive hunting which pits them as threats to the tigers’ existence. It is unsurprising that such behaviour creates a climate of mistrust and inculcates a tendency amongst indigenous peoples to use resources for private, short-term gain in order to benefit from the fruits of their previous ecologically sensitive use of the land and their labour before it is taken away.105 Their lack of control engenders lack of interest and apathy, perhaps as a psychological coping mechanism. Frequently, indigenous people have no motivation, even if there were open channels of communication, to inform those without ecosystemic knowledge of, for example, the purpose of not clearing the thorny branches at the base of young bamboo clumps, thereby exposing them to grazing animals.106 The stripping of autonomy from indigenous communities represents active suppression of the ‘other’. This has become normalised via political practices of domination, exploitation and violence.107 It was evident at the global forum of the 1992 Earth Summit, where pluralistic and alternative epistemologies became subsumed: The motto for the North at the UN Earth Summit and other global negotiations seems to be: ‘What is yours is mine; what is mine is mine’. This lopsided view of a common future is made easier by the idea of the ‘global’. Through its global reach the North exists in the South. The South, however, exists only within itself. The South can only exist locally, while only the North exists globally.108

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 193 The dominant rationality that regards the world as ‘objectively knowable’ reigns supreme over ‘local knowledge’, which in turn becomes encompassed within Western logic.109 Such representation is legitimised by Western epistemic knowledge, based upon Cartesian rationality presented as of universal and instrumental validity in civilised society. All other forms of knowledge are violently robbed of comparable significance. This however, does not mean that there does not exist alternative epistemological views and attending practices.110 Alternative representations, potentially threatening to this culturally specific teleological epistemology, need to be marginalised and institutionally silenced to allow unabated imperialist practices. Thus, state policies have actively and variously undermined indigenous ways of living and disenfranchised indigenous people, through ‘re-education’, the separation of children from their parents, the assimilation of ‘backward’ and ‘undeveloped’ into mainstream cultural forms, forced resettlement, or refusal to acknowledge the actual presence of people with rights.111 Indigenous varieties of knowledge are negated. It is forgotten that the Western knowledge system is, itself, derivative of a local context, specific to that system’s cultural and ecological particularities, inclusive of its own inherent biases of, for example, gender and class. Its colonising normative characteristic is one of its local anomalies that has arisen from a particular historical juncture, namely the conjunction of an imperialist scientific method and the advent of colonial exploration of the world; both drives are consolidated around the concept, and all its associated values, of capital accumulation. As such, Western knowledge is structured and accorded legitimation in perpetuating, even generating anew, inequalities and oppressive relations. Built within this perspective is the universalising impetus to violently misrepresent other perspectives and/or replace ‘primitive’ knowledge system with ‘scientific’ knowledge. The assignation of adjectives reflects the power of the dominant perspective to deny alternative perspectives equal consideration, thus validity and, at the same time, assumes Western knowledge to be above critical analysis. Denial of indigenous knowledge, by rendering it invisible or perverting its worth, is strengthened by also destroying the conditions of the local knowledge’s existence; thus the local cultural and ecological bases of knowledge are fragmented and dispersed, leaving no basis for diversity – no basis for anything but the dominant monoculture.112 Denigration of alternative knowledges amounts to a ‘colonization of the mind’ and depletion of human, as well as nonhuman and plant diversity.113 This is irreversible, according to the teleological momentum of Western development as well as the ontological extinction of life. Accordingly, development represents a continuation of colonialism and a strategy to bring the Third World into the orbit of the global economy with consequent social and ecological disturbances.114 Indeed, contestations over the meanings of land and political space in post-colonial Third World countries remain, in a Marxian sense, not entirely of the local peoples’ own choosing. The legacies of colonial structures are manifest in daily practices and historical struggles for democratic rights.115

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It has been argued that rural Africa has experienced an unbroken sequence of imperialist intrusion and disruption of indigenous knowledge and skills. International development agencies and financial institutions, in alliance with national elites, prescribe in autocratic fashion programmes that directly threaten the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, whose validity is ignored. The interests of those with the most political and economic might is prevalent, impoverishing the human and natural resources of their capital base; as in colonial times, control is located at some external and distant point. Many development programmes fall into neglect because, in part, they are inherently inappropriate and non-sustainable and, in part, because there is no local willingness to participate in something over which the local people had no decision-making influence.116 This integrity of indigenous communities is being actively undermined at an intensifying rate fuelled by commercial interests in the expropriation, commodification and consequent debasement of the knowledge and resources of indigenous peoples.117 Ecological struggles can often be interpreted as struggles emergent from and about poverty.118 Yet, to view poverty as the prime cause of environmental degradation, as Western development bodies are apt to,119 is to flagrantly obscure the fundamental dynamics of modern capitalism. Coerced displacement from the land, either through economic forces or sanctioned violence, is a major cause of poverty and a constraint on sustainable development.120 Inevitably, poor people pollute and degrade the environment, but only marginally compared to wealthier, developed communities. The most ecologically destructive and economically debilitating practice, that impoverished indigenous peoples resort to in times of severe stress, is to consume rather than plant seed, thereby exhausting a potential life-sustaining resource. This ‘second wave of colonization’ (following the initial wave of slavery), whereby farmers were not uncommonly forced to abandon their own seeds and technologies in favour of ‘miracle seeds’ and water and chemical intensive monocultures, is now said to be complemented by a discernible third wave: the ‘biotechnology revolution’.121 Whereas, in the second phase, indigenous farmers relinquished their autonomous ability to sustain their community in favour of cash crops for the state’s foreign revenue, in the third phase, the area for colonisation is not the land, but the knowledge and skills of indigenous peoples. As in the original colonisation experiences, internal cultural disparities are aggravated and coerced usurpation of human and natural resources by centralised, outside control engenders cultural strife, impoverishment and, at times, famine.122 In this third stage, indigenous seeds and technologies are selectively embraced, appropriated and released from the local ecological and cultural context; acknowledgement of their origins is rendered obsolete within the universalising rationale, whereby ‘primitive cultivars’ are linguistically and actually rendered of lesser significance by ‘elite’ corporations.123 In addition, with advances in biotechnology and an extension of modern, Cartesian knowledge, the latest ‘discovery’ of ‘new “colonies” to invade and exploit’ is the actual bodies of indigenous peoples. Akin to the appropriation


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and exploration of the ‘interior spaces’ of nonhuman animals for scientific advancement, this branch of human colonisation, in parallel with the pollution and depletion of traditional colonies, lands and knowledges for furthering the imperative of unending capital accumulation, is the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). Conceived by a group of scientists ‘to create a global map of human genetic variation’, 700 ethnic groups have been selected because they are ‘endangered’ ‘isolates of historic interest’. The aim is to document comparative genetic information to allow for the possible understanding of human evolution, to allow for an understanding of anthropological questions of who we are and from where we originate, as well as aiding understanding of differences in susceptibility to medical ailments.124 Such scientific ‘enclosure of life’ is permitted under the Western legal concept of intellectual property rights.125 Indigenous peoples, whose lives and knowledge systems are constructed around differing, holistic ideas, values and practices regarding interdependence with their local ecological context regard this most recent imperialist move as a sacrilegious debasement of their lives.126 It is argued that the driving momentum of these imperialist practices is the replacement of diversity by ‘uniform monocultures – of plants and people’ which need to be ‘externally managed because they are no longer self-regulated and self-governed’.127 Thus are the conditions as well as the logics for autocratic control created by an abstract entity termed the market with very particular social origins. In fact, the fundamental wrong is the insistent perversion of identity, forcing ‘indigenous people to divert their energies from the positive pursuit of indigenously defined social change, to the negative goal of resisting cultural, political, and economic domination by the West’.128 The rejection of modern subjection and global capitalism pits rebellious peasants against the might of a homogeneous discourse; it is feared, that if they are not assimilated within the developed world they may violently destabilise their object status and enveloping discourse.129 Further, it is in the interests of capital accumulation to assimilate them for ‘[m]arginalized, assetless, unorganized poor people will never be efficient producers and consumers’.130 Thus modern, Western forces are attempting to mediate a path of continued control and exploitation. However, to counter such imperialist behaviour, ‘a more legitimate and sustainable form of change is evident. People across Africa are redefining the meaning and intent of development’.131 Indigenous people are reasserting their autonomy and creatively rebuilding their lives, based upon their own knowledge and local needs as the following section illuminates. For, ‘[e]mbedded in every ideology that legitimizes domination there is a sub-text, a legitimizing ideology of resistance’.132

Becoming a subject From a subjugated position of objectification arise politicised subjects, propelled by anger at the injustice meted out to them. As an Indian villager

196 Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples explains: ‘Our fields only yield a little grain, and when we could get no wood to cook even what we had, we had to resort to a movement’.133 This phrase encapsulates the political passion and the need to survive that has moved peasants to resist; to fight against, for example, state-licensed commercial logging in the Alakananda Valley (India), which had brought about severe landslides, flooding and devastation of the environment, loss of human and animal life. The Chipko movement arose from a situation of dire necessity after a prolonged history of regional deprivation and political marginalisation. The persistence of an imperialist logic of external knowledge and control, manifested in the commercial forestry in the Himalaya, amounted to an unbroken history of extractive policies and impoverishment of local communities.134 Such disastrous ‘development’ can reconfirm indigenous peoples’ belief in their capabilities to take care of the land.135 Land is essential, materially, psychologically and spiritually, within indigenous cultures; the resourcefulness of the earth informs the life-styles and identities of indigenous peoples who reverentially recognise the interdependency of this mutual relationship between themselves and the ecosystem. An Andean perspective, for example, reveals the world as being constantly re-created by the dynamic flux of symbiotic social, spiritual and ecological elements.136 The identity of the Dyak of Sarawak (Borneo) is intricately implicated with their practice of shifting cultivation (swidden farming); they are acutely conscious that the forest constitutes the source of their existence and therefore it is revered as the cultural focus of their identity and spiritual beliefs.137 A fundamental principle to indigenous communities is the understanding that land is entrusted to the present incumbents by the communities’ ancestors for future generations;138 possession is temporary; a pause between the past and the future. Modern development’s preoccupation with the present, that is, its disregard for the past and the future, sets it apart from traditional cosmologies of local communities in ‘un[der]developed’ regions139 where a ‘personalized and long-term view of resources continues to infuse the everyday accounts’ of indigenous peoples.140 As a result, indigenous peoples have been termed the globe’s ‘ideal natural resource managers’ for their knowledge is founded upon generations of symbiotic cultural and ecological rhythmic evolution and equates with a ‘life-enhancing paradigm’.141 Such respect for the integrity of the land is incommensurable with the modern notion of exclusive ownership. Non-possessiveness, however, does not equate with non-use or even an aversion to management of the land. The cultural diversity of indigenous communities residing within biologically diverse habitats has ensured a plural diversity of resistance movements to imposed land use change; for some cultures resistance has become inseparable from indigenous tradition; for others the turmoil of outside enforced interference and the ensuing rupture of peoples’ rooted beliefs and livelihoods has driven radically new forms of behaviour and previously unknown


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reasons for political mobilisation.142 An example of the collective power and strength of a necessarily new form of politicisation in reaction to external threats is seen in the number of organisations that have arisen demanding inclusion in global forums. So The Coordinating Body for Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) assert in their mission statement: The two million members of the indigenous peoples of South America’s Amazon Basin, representing more than 500 distinct cultures, have been using tropical forests in a sustainable way for thousands of years. We will go on doing so, and any state or international policy that aspires to do the same must co-ordinate with the indigenous peoples. We, the indigenous Amazonians, talk with nature, with or without conventions, with or without financial funds. With this historical and moral authority we call on governments and the UN system to work with us to avoid the destruction of the unity between Amazonia and its indigenous peoples.143 These ‘modern resource managers’ draw their confidence from their accumulated knowledge and use of diverse and ‘complex cultivation strategies’ within their ‘intensively-managed’ home environment. For example, the Kayapó have traditionally replanted valued medicinal and food plants to accommodate their daily lives along trails, creating ‘resource islands’ at a distance from inhabited areas with thought for the wider animal and plant ecological systems; ‘fallow’ plots are not entirely abandoned but sensitively managed to a limited extent to ensure successful forest regeneration.144 Fire, an integral element to indigenous cosmology, is also used as a tool to clear unwanted vegetation and pests and to enhance soil fertility; since the soils of the Amazonia forests are poor and acidic, the greatest concentration of nutrients is stored in the living organic material. This is returned to the soil through its ash so stimulating re-invigorated growth; the aim is diversity of species, plant and animal, amid spatial diversity.145 Similarly, fire was of paramount ecological significance to Australian Aborigines as a nutrient exchange mechanism and as a means of mitigating natural large-scale fires. This ‘fire-stick farming’ clearly demonstrates the awareness of ecological context known by indigenous farmers for it was rapidly undone with the arrival of foreigners.146 Thus the landscape under the guidance of native communities is constantly evolving and being enriched for all life forms. The large tracts of forest that appear ‘natural’ are in fact ‘the consequence of careful choices’.147 The ecological and cultural community is one and the same within a time that incorporates the past and the future as well as the present: In the indigenous cycle of things, when we stayed too long in an area we would see that the game fled and the people’s dreams were no longer good, and so we would leave, and let the maloca collapse. But that place

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples was not lost to us or abandoned because sometimes we had our dead there and we knew we would always return, and so for this reason we would plant fruits, medicines and magic plants for this life and for the other forest lives that would follow us. We saw that forest not as a bunch of trees, but as a place in which our history and our future was written . . . The forest is not a wild thing to us. It is our world.148

The acceptance of the land as the world incites careful manipulation of this source of life for the sustenance of human and animal life. It is not ‘wild’, nor a passive object, and neither in turn, are its inhabitants. Earlier this century, in colonial Africa, it was acknowledged that [t]here is little we can teach the Kano [Nigerian] farmer . . . they have acquired the necessary precise knowledge as to the time to prepare the land for sowing; when and how to sow; how long to let the land be fallow; what soils suit certain crops; what varieties of the same crop will succeed in some localities and what varieties in others . . . how to ensure rotation; when to arrange with Fulani herdsmen to pasture their cattle upon the land.149 This knowledge has not been entirely lost. Indeed, indigenous people are angered that their extensive knowledge of specific crop varieties and associated characteristics, soil conditions and climatic conditions are dismissed, demanding more than mere patronising ‘participation’ in ‘their’ projects. For example, in West Africa peasants frequently have recourse to up to twenty different strains of rice seed for varying soil and climatic conditions and varying growth and fruition rates; in India it has been discovered that an indigenous soil classification system is of greater complexity and comprehensiveness than that of the US Agricultural Department.150 Thus is the risk of crop failure minimised, labour requirements spread and managed biodiversity maintained based upon a precise understanding of their environment. [Indigenous farmers] have a vocabulary of hundreds of names of trees and grasses. They can rate the fertility of a piece of land by the physical characteristics of the soil; they can assess the number of seasons for which it must be rested before such results can be obtained again.151 This is the reason why monocultural agricultural and forestry systems have to be promoted aggressively by global corporations – to counter the subtlety and variety of knowledges held by indigenous farmers, who are able to tap into a long cultural heritage of sustainable and interdependent living within their local environment.152 Accordingly, a reductionist perspective is necessitated, aided and abetted by a singular globalised language, to rule out the knowledge system of, for example, the Hanunoo in the Philippines and their knowledge


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of 1,600 local plants;153 or the Haustec Indians of Mexico who cultivate around 300 different plants in various garden, forest, and field plots; or the forty-nine different varieties of rice grown in one village of Sierra Leone, to account for changing seasonal and soil factors and to ensure a continuous supply of this staple food;154 or, to reduce a forest, conceptually, to that of a capital base for timber production, and not recognise it as a diverse source of food, medicinal products, building materials, fuel wood, fodder, and as a system of ecological, hydrological and meteorological import to the local environment. Respecting the knowledge of indigenous people is the beginning of a process of conceding to disadvantaged communities the right to question and command alternative opinions. The only limitation of this definition is that it presupposes that those who have power will willingly share it with others . . . [It] also masks our – the external resource providers’ – powerlessness in understanding and uncovering the creativity and entrepreneurship of knowledge-rich and economically-poor people.155 Being able to retain such a wealth of knowledge in global conditions of powerlessness is made possible by the holistic nature of indigenous knowledge systems, themselves specifically contextualised by particular ecological, social, cultural, temporal and moral conditions.156 Each dimension is relevant and inseparable. Thus the productivity of a plot is determined not only by soil fertility and climate conditions but also by the relationship of those tilling the land to it, materially and spiritually. In contrast modern knowledge compartmentalises each dynamic and focuses upon a certain number of factors and excludes others from consideration. The implications of this are that, since there is no dichotomisation within indigenous world-views, there does not exist the legitimation for an exploitative relationship with earth, nor, consequently other relations: The forest is a cultural and psychological landscape for its inhabitants, the repository of a human heritage extending back thousands of years. The diversity of language, social structure, political leadership, justice systems and intellectual development seems to match the flora and fauna, astonishing Western political and social commentators, shaming the homogenising West.157 Cultural diversity is reflective of biological diversity. The homogenising hegemony of Western politics cannot, nor will not, allow for such differences. Indigenous people ask for respectful, not necessarily uncritical, admission of local knowledge. For indigenous people live their ‘theory’ daily; they ‘are active knowers of their own reality, as well as being subjects of their own knowledge’.158 So they recognise clearly that the disintegration of their

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indigenous knowledge is as great a consequence as loss of habitat.159 For the symbiotic evolution of cultural and ecological systems means that indigenous peoples, however economically and politically marginalised from the global, are locally those with the power:160 Destroy native cultures – so many have been destroyed – and the world loses the knowledge that has taken several millennia of Amazonian history to evolve . . . Agriculture requires living cultures, working with all the elements of their agronomy: the particular environment, the cultivars, the ways people talk about agriculture, their rituals and lore.161 As Medha Paktar, an activist campaigning against India’s Narmada Dam project and recipient in 1991 of the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ observes, indigenous people are culturally and spiritually rich, if not financially, for [t]hey are integrated. They know how to manage their lives with happiness and within the available resources. And they have a more or less sustainable way of handling natural capital resources. They have three ‘lenders’ at their disposal; the land, the forest, and the river. Unlike the World Bank, these natural ‘banks’ come to their help when they need them, in one season one, in another season another.162 Thus an associate of Chico Mendes said, ‘you only need to see how poor we are to know that [we would not destroy the forest]’.163 A meeting of rubber tappers to discuss principles of extraction and the future of their Reserve, granted by the Brazilian government following the murder of Mendes, affirmed the participants’ ecological commitment. This was an ethical and practical response to daily realities. Those who had visited ‘civilised’ towns had been shocked by sights of ‘a dead river without fish and people lying hungry in the streets with no game to hunt and no palm fronds with which to thatch a shelter’.164 Mendes, speaking on behalf of rubber tappers had defined their desired version of development: When we say we’re against deforestation people say we’re against the development of Brazil. We’re not against development, but we’re against the devastation of Amazonia. We want development that doesn’t only benefit the big companies and the powerful, but the people that work on the land.165 The selective adoption of some global strategies has aided indigenous peoples in their resistance to Westernised ‘development’. Thus Third World Network has become an international forum and has devised its own concept of ‘collective intellectual property rights’. This radiates from indigenous farmers’ knowledge of plant species and roles in creatively conserving diversity and


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provides a counterweight to the commercial monopolisation of plant resources by multinational companies, which are protected by international legal ‘agreements’ for bioprospecting.166 Likewise tribal peoples have not infrequently selectively adopted modern technologies to defend their heritage. An example is that of the Kayapós’ video recording by air of Amazonian rainforest clearance, which simultaneously demonstrates their cultural vitality and power of resistance without compromising their cultural and ecological integrity, for conservation of their home, the forest, remains the central issue.167 Thus the ‘monolithic approach to technology’ that remains foundational to global political and economic theories,168 sits uneasily alongside such illustrations of conscious adaptation. This proves the political strength of the subjects, for the globalisation of the term technology is derivative of specific cultural origins that have been imposed by dominant capitalist powers.169 For this reason, it has been argued that cross-cultural transference of technology is inappropriate for it represents an implicit acceptance of Western/Northern technological and scientific supremacy.170 Yet, this following Kayapó woman illustrates that indigenous communities hold the power to choose to adopt or to reject Western technology and discourse. Her self-confidence and passion have not been mitigated: At the Altamira meeting, a Kayapó woman in full regalia raced up to the head of Eletronorte, brandishing her machete, and with a scream raised it and brought it down just short of each of his shoulders. She swore at him, full of bitter contempt: ‘Do you think that we’re so stupid, do you think that we don’t know what your plans are for us, what your plans are for this forest? Have we been here for millennia and you think that your silly plans are beyond our understanding . . . don’t think for a moment that we are somehow going to disappear between now and 1995 when you plan to flood these lands’. . . . because we occasionally engage in such [theatrical] gestures, people think that when we don’t do them all the time we are adapting ourselves to the plans [of] the Brazilian government . . . not the case. One must choose the moments in which theatrical gestures will be most effective . . . just because things are calm and quiet doesn’t mean we’re quiescent. All of these things show that we are vibrant and living cultures and we won’t be undone by what the Brazilian government has in mind for us.171 Donna Haraway’s attempt to theoretically reconcile these tales of the ‘traditional’ meeting with the ‘modern’, entitled ‘Tech in the Jungle’, recreates the abstract polarisation of nature–culture and modern–traditional that the Kayapó people absolutely refute. Nevertheless, Haraway concedes that although the Kayapó woman’s action is one of resistance from the margins, the Kayapó woman articulates her own representation in her own terms, rejecting any conception of objectification and this is possible ‘not because

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they cross a line to represent themselves in “modern” terms as Subjects, but because they powerfully form articulated collectives’.172 This amounts to a more powerful resistant bloc of subject status, instead of the Western norm of atomised individuals each struggling as subjects, and reflects the indigenous norm of communitarianism. Culturally contingent respect for human diversity is necessitated so that varied cultural traditions are allowed ‘space’ for ‘relatively autonomous transformation’ and do not become ossified in opposition to the hegemony of Western norms. The ‘cultural and political entailments’ of technological development that threaten cultural diversity, not progression per se, require challenging.173 For cultural identity pivots on sustained cultural solidarity rather than the non-adoption of new strategies. An analysis of the ‘selectively eclectic’ co-option of Western farming techniques by indigenous peoples finds that culturally such strategies are justified as a means of survival for the integrity of the local community.174 Indeed, the Kayapó have actively directed development, extracted taxes, managed mining and brought about the establishment of a 7.4 million acre reserve from the Brazilian government showing that indigenous peoples can assert themselves without compromising their identity.175 Nevertheless, there persists a danger in adopting foreign technologies; the human scale of indigenous work practices means that the people remain subjects of their own lives, in contrast to Westernised farmers who are becoming increasingly subject to the dictates of multinational companies, who have bound them legally and financially as objects. Indigenous peoples can be resilient and adaptive subjects pro-actively sustaining their local context, knowledge and livelihoods. It is the abruptness and pace of change that determines their attitude and subsequent behaviour. In semi-arid and arid regions of Africa where rural people are constantly adapting to climatic and ecological changes, where environmental change is gradual, local expertise and techniques have allowed for continued and sustainable agriculture. But where there has been a dramatic and unforeseen transformation in the local environment, the local response is often fatalistic and local people cannot but become objects at the mercy of the elements.176 Furthermore, it has been found repeatedly that indigenous peoples, in order to temporarily stem a crisis, may accept alien forms of knowledge. However, foreign practices do not become normalised and permanent features of indigenous societies.177 As a corollary to not accepting externally-imposed, inappropriate techniques, indigenous people are defensive of the usurpation of their knowledge and methods by outsiders amounting to ‘cultural decolonization’,178 a stripping away of ‘the last vestiges of . . . sovereignty over resources’. For it is a question ultimately of ‘survival, humanity, dignity and democracy’.179 Selfassertiveness is being translated into a refusal at being objectified, a refusal to allow the undermining of their cultural and ecological integrity and a forceful, if necessary, reassertion of their cultural and ecological being:


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For generations, people have been ridiculing, undermining, subverting and deflecting the schemes of colonialists and developers . . . Whether overt or subterranean, thwarted or beaten down, channelled into ideology or action, this resistance has been opportunistic, pragmatic and resourceful. . . . This resistance has largely been a resistance to incorporation . . . Resistance, whether it takes the form of blocking a logging road, surreptitiously siphoning off some of a landlord’s grain, or burning a tree plantation, has often been indistinguishable from provision for survival.180 At the same time, there not infrequently exist internal struggles where two systems of activity are being practised – one officially mandated, the other meeting local needs and run by marginalised members of the community. For social tensions are exacerbated when invariably the official scheme employs and remunerates the most dominant community members reinforcing traditional inequalities.181 Local tensions are highlighted since state and other similar institutional policies are normally following a resource-exploitative mandate without future foresight. The very poor who are not included in the scheme are forced into smaller areas of land and on to communal lands, considered free and un(der)utilised and are left with no choice but to intensify their use of the land; both logics are recognised as ecologically unhealthy by the subjects in question.182 Thus a vicious circle is initiated, for these peasant farmers are then blamed for the local environmental degradation. Furthermore, romantic visions of social and ecological harmony are shattered by the grim reality of the abuse of power also prevalent within indigenous communities, whereby hierarchical ranking vindicates the oppression of some devalued members (for example, women). However, as a homogeneous grouping, indigenous peoples recognise that they have been exploited, akin to the plundering of their land and forests, by successive colonialist powers: Throughout the last 500 years we peasants have been stepped on by the wealthy, the mestizos, and the Spaniards; the trees and animals similarly have been abused and are being extinguished, and thus we share much suffering along with the environment.183 This cognitive depth to resistance and resurgence of subject status provides a source of legitimation and also explains why, at times, foreign aid is accepted. The legacy of colonialism that persists in contemporary Africa, for example, and the precarious stability of post-colonial Africa have ensured a continuation of the struggle of rural Africans for integral autonomy, culturally and economically. Both colonialism and national independence are seen to continue policies that exploit and appropriate the resources and harvests of rural people. These objectifying practices provide momentum for resistance.

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Resistance need not be monumental; it is the everyday forms of resistance that count cumulatively – ‘the foot-dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage and so forth’. These are the ‘weapons of the weak’ which because they ‘avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms’ are submerged.184 In effect, such acts and the corresponding dialogue among the disempowered are constitutive of the ‘hidden transcript’ in the balance of global politics. It is a subordinate[d] dialogue, out of earshot of the political decision makers. Therefore hegemonic conceptions of ‘development’ end up reproducing alien situations and creating potentially explosive relations.185 That indigenous people refuse to abide by foreign rules is ‘no mystery’: If people do not have the incentive or ability to invest labour and resources, they will not do so. Incentives come from commitment, values, and rewards all of which have been devalued in the new moral order created by imperfect markets and the greed of town cultures and bureaucratic elites.186 Occasions when indigenous people adapt foreign aid projects to local conditions are demonstrations of their ‘dynamic, experimenting, [and] innovative’ willingness to engage as equals, thereby rebuffing the ‘conniving and threatening programmes of planners’.187 Yet, the fruits of their labour, the fertile land and its harvest, become the source of contention: to whom do they belong? Once again control becomes the central issue and local growers are forced to preserve their development against covetous reappropriation by external planners and/or the community elite. Opposition strategies range from the passive to the inflammatory and are not always ecologically benign. Frequently, the outcome has been an explosion of rural activism . . . Small farmers are standing up to assassination threats; weathering the contempt of bureaucrats; petitioning cabinet officials; arranging strategy meetings with other villagers; calling on reserves of political experience going back decades; marching; rallying; blocking roads; ripping out seedlings; chopping down eucalyptus trees; burning nurseries; planting fruit, rubber and forest trees in order to demonstrate their own conservationist awareness . . . Their message is simple. They want individual land rights. They want community rights to local forests, which they will conserve themselves . . . And they want the right to veto any commercial plantation scheme in their locality.188 The ‘social’ forestry experience of Karnataka reveals the reductionist paradigm of external developers. Refusing to see the silvicultural expertise of the local people, World Bank-sponsored experts ‘decided that indigenous knowledge was worthless and “unscientific” and proceeded to destroy the diversity of indigenous species by replacing them with row after row of eucalyptus


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seedlings in polythene bags, in government nurseries’.189 The eucalyptus is notorious for ruining fertile lands, creating arid deserts; it demands high inputs of water and does not produce humus to aid water retention in the soil. However, it does provide pulp for timber factories outside the local economy. As such, eucalyptus has come to symbolise the globalising ecological and cultural mining of indigenous communities. It was for these reasons that in the summer of 1983, peasants of two villages in Karnataka descended upon the forestry nursery, where they pulled out millions of eucalyptus seedlings and replaced them with mango and tamarind, indigenous species that provide products useful to their local communities. Such was their anger, they risked arrest to challenge the authority of the dominant knowledge system that reduced their forest to one species, destroying the natural diversity that stabilises and sustains the local environment, ecologically and culturally. This activity led to the suspension of international aid and forced a re-evaluation of ‘social forestry’.190 Despite the divisive forces that impoverish local communities, local ecological knowledge persists, as is testified in the uprisings against outside exploitative control. The ‘social history’ of the Chipko environmental movement reveals that not only did the villagers perceive the causal connections between deforestation, landslides and flooding, but also the economic underdevelopment of the entire region and the widespread abuse of alcohol as a consequence of male despair. Taken up by a co-operative organisation, it represented a timeless peasant struggle: a defence of stability versus progressive and binding capitalism. However, more than that, its assertiveness in actively challenging the global cultural hegemony of capitalism, revealed the strength of assumed powerless people.191 Furthermore, the cognitive transformation of the Chipko movement, from a protest over resources to a critical movement that questioned the ‘science’ and its philosophy of appropriating nature, enabled other ecological movements in different contexts to reproduce the success of the Chipko movement.192 It was also popularised by the romanticism of the dramatic act of hugging the trees to save the forests (‘Chipko’ means ‘to hug’). However, its ‘celebrity status abroad’ glosses over the protests expressed locally regarding the inequalities of development in India and relative marginalisation of the area. Thus this phenomenon has been labelled for international consumption as ‘the unquestioned icon of grassroots environmentalism’ despite its locally evolved incorporation into the wider issue of local economic autonomy and development.193 These examples reveal the enmeshment of ecological and cultural factors: conflicts arising from inequitable resource distribution and inappropriate ideas regarding development require politicisation from a holistic perception of the local context. Politicisation of such ‘survival movements of the rural poor’194 represent ‘the most innovative responses to the ecological crisis of modern society’.195 The fact that these movements arise from conditions of perceived helplessness and dire survival needs, and that they have been

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propelled by anger may, however, test the inherent power of these newly selfconscious political subjects. Whether positive, long-term strategies can be sustained against the might of the hegemony of capitalist production and consumption is the area of discussion for the following, final section, where the pull of power illuminates indigenous peoples, rather than submerging them. The potential for the retheorisation of IR to account for our ecological contextualisation is held by these re-empowered subjects.

The power of the subject Yet . . . it’s the people who make the picture. Her mouth masked by one hand, the woman gazes straight into the lens with a searing directness. She doesn’t plead and she doesn’t cower . . . This image is about us, the woman’s gaze implies – the sort of idle voyeurs who insist on inspecting the world’s misery but not stopping it . . . 196

By illuminating the processes that disempower indigenous peoples and also their emergence as politicised subjects of their own choosing, the paucity of IR is revealed. The social injustice of IR’s restrictive perspective is implicated with the inexorable Cartesian degradation of the ecological fabric of life. Consequently, indigenous peoples speaking for and from local ecological and cultural contexts represent contemporary voices for the survival of all relations upon this varied political expanse that is the international. The argument presented here asks the discipline of IR to recall its constituents in locations of pluralistic diversity, without becoming another ‘idle voyeur’. That indigenous communities may play a ‘vital role in environmental management’ is acknowledged within international agreements.197 There have been a number of charters, including the Charter of the Indigenous-Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests, the Maatatua Declaration of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, articulated to assert indigenous autonomy. However, this is mediated by a persistent insistence upon state protection, thereby continuing to infantilise indigenous peoples; both the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and the declaration and programme of action arising from the World Conference on Human Rights explicitly assert that the plurality of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and the inherent ‘value and diversity of their distinct identities, cultures and social organization’ unequivocally require paternalistic preservation by the state.198 Since ‘the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign States’ remains beyond question199 self-determination by indigenous communities is not considered an option.200 Furthermore, these treaties employ the Western concepts of exclusive ownership and protection of intellectual property rights, which has cautioned some indigenous communities to reject them as merely another external and inappropriate form arising from a singular, universalising and, possibly, commodifying legalisation for the plurality of diverse local epistemologies and


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contexts.201 This argument interprets such treaties as imperialistic: condoning the fragmentation and alienation of land from indigenous societies, abetting the exploitation of internal divisions.202 Accordingly, it is important to locate the politicisation of indigenous people’s concerns, to differentiate between the voices of the local people and those who arrive to add voice to and widen the particular concern. The appropriation of local consciousness by outside activists and/or academics can sometimes romanticise the predicament, whilst at the same time persist in the subordination of indigenous peoples, by dismissing their independent ability to critique and protest.203 It ignores the fact that indigenous people are deeply concerned and daily aware of their predicament. They will certainly involve themselves in tree planting, but only if they are properly consulted in the first place and can decide themselves on the inputs they require to break the deadly cycles of poverty.204 (Re)Colonisation through the discourse of development has ontological repercussions, resulting in a materially and spiritually poorer world. To argue on behalf of indigenous peoples from a culturally and geographically distant position may concomitantly aid their cultural demise via practices that imply assimilation into the global paradigm.205 ‘The subaltern do in fact speak, even if the audibility of their voices in the circles where “the West” is reflected upon and theorized is tenuous at best.’206 If the voluble West allowed a twoway dialogue, questions such as: ‘How could you start building the dam before coming to ask us?’207 would be respectfully heard. As Escobar says, ‘[t]he Western scientist continues to speak for the Earth. God forbid that a Peruvian peasant, an African nomad, or a rubber tapper of the Amazons should have something to say in this regard’.208 The dilemma is that if you are attacking powerful institutions you have to learn their terminology and dissect their methodology. But it is the voice of aboriginal peoples, with their questions which can’t be answered, and reaching out to others as well, that really matters.209 It has been found that particularistic local concerns sometimes need to be placed within a larger context and that local communities and indigenous knowledge systems benefit from the managerial skills of outsiders to protect and promote their world-views. In order to facilitate concerted opposition to the proposed dam in the Narmada region of India, activists from outside the valley were able to contextualise local, particularistic concerns within the grander critique of capitalist development. This included the questions of access to natural resources according to class differentiation and the imposition of resource-intensive industrial developments controlled by foreigners who make no personal sacrifices. Thus a consolidated front was presented

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overcoming gender, caste, and party differences, revolutionising people’s lives by allowing them to recognise their political significance.210 That effective protestation requires Westernised educational prowess to argue the case of the disempowered is the experience of Accord, in Kerala (India), which litigates on behalf of tribal peoples for the defence of land titles; so aiding a reversal of the tradition of low self-esteem that had been engendered by generations of exploitation and deprivation of autonomy and rights.211 Such organisations see more clearly the interdependence of environmental regeneration and social regeneration. Thus, the KSK (Centre for Conservation of Traditional Farming Systems) in India promotes the reintroduction of traditional seeds and traditional farming methods, to reverse the social and ecologically destructive process of non-sustainable high-input agriculture introduced during the Green Revolution of the 1970s. It recognises that traditional indigenous crops are not only ecologically attuned to the local conditions but are also superior in nutritive value to the commercial varieties. In addition, food insecurity in the past is identified as the result, not of misuse of environmental resources, for the local farmers employed a variety of strategies to minimise the consequences of potential disasters to ensure a harvest, but of unjust financial demands from external authorities.212 In Latin America, the organisation, PRATEC (Proyecto Andino de Technologias Campesinas) demonstrates that from diverse cultures there are arising comparable movements challenging the globalised hegemony of capitalist production of monocultures. Its function is to promote ‘Andean cosmovision’, encouraging resistance to the ‘colonizing, Western perspective of universalisable “subjects’’ ’.213 This example and the following illustrate the difficulties encountered in relating indigenous epistemologies foreign to the English language. The cultural specificity of language obstructs depiction of other cultures. So English is found insufficient: wanting flexibility and imagination of spirit when describing India’s ‘Sacred Groves’: sacred areas of wilderness actively preserved by natives. Yet a ‘Sacred Grove’ is more than land with which people interact, it is revered as the site of the cyclic ‘regeneration of body, land and community’.214 This world-view contrasts fundamentally with the instrumentalist and detached version of knowing one’s natural environment promulgated by the West. The relationship of indigenous peoples to their land is both unique according to the ecosystemic determinants and central to their cultural identity as a community.215 Thus epistemological diversity is a natural outcome of ontological diversity; cultural diversity is a result of biological diversity: diversity is holistic, inclusive of spiritual articulations. But the homogenising force of Western epistemology eliminates this vital and complex plurality.216 The singular, modern, industrialised notion of a relationship with earth not only threatens biodiversity and cultural/epistemic diversity, but also confers a universalised obliteration to sameness. Therefore


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there is a need to democratise knowledge, to recognise that all knowledge is contingently local and to allow for all local knowledges.217 The subtle and political orchestration of language is evidenced even in those commentators sympathetic to a critique of Western development; hence the (mistaken) categorisation of the Chipko resistance movement to logging throughout the Garhwal Himalaya in northern India as a peasant movement, on the basis of its similarity to anti-colonist rebellions of an earlier era.218 However, the success of the Chipko movement was a result of the skilful manipulation of the rhetoric employed and images promoted by the ‘peasants’. The marginalised indigenous people of the Himalayans portrayed themselves, resisting the totalising manacles of the market and the state; it was as much a question of democracy and regional integrity in the face of unsound development from outside as that of ecological devastation caused by the felling of forests and subsequent landslides, floods, shortages of fuel, fodder and land still with top soil that could be cultivated – to list just the direct ecological consequences.219 Chipko illustrated resistance to the economisation of politics by external authorities. This belies the argument that indigenous people are only ‘environmentalists by default’.220 However, the contradictory activities of indigenous people, whose lives are ‘constrained by their lack of control over their resource base’ means that their lives are susceptible to contrary interpretation. On the one hand, reverence for nature ensures respect, in fact, suffuses indigenous beliefs and activities; yet, on the other hand, their need to subsist, on a pressing daily level, requires them to exploit the land without allowing thought for the future, partly legitimised by the belief in the regenerative ability of nature.221 However, the homogenising reductionism and centralising actions of nonlocal decision-makers cannot but bring about ecologically and culturally insensitive change. The postulated superiority of universally applicable methods aiming for a global economy can often only be introduced against the wishes of indigenous peoples via means of misinformation and/or violence. Politically, pluralistic renditions of reality are repressed, and the ‘assertion of indigenous rights and the transfer of resources back to local communities is being and will continue to be, resisted by those who benefit most from present development strategies’.222 The alternative to alienating the rural poor, who are often illiterate and/or speak a marginalised dialect, from the ownership of their indigenous knowledge, is its absorption.223 Contrary to the denigration of indigenous epistemologies and methods, there have arisen attempts to selectively appropriate and absorb techniques within the global market-controlled hegemony of what counts environmentally.224 But the fundamental point is lost for the local context of such indigenous knowledges is the very basis and being of its existence and essential for ecological and cultural stasis: Development cannot be grafted onto a country like a foreign body, it must grow within the country at a grassroots level, utilizing readily

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples available resources . . . When communities discover their own potential power to initiate development, the spirit engendered becomes their most valuable asset . . . one that can set them firmly on the road to selfreliance.225

‘Development’ has failed in Africa, repeatedly, precisely because it has been imposed upon communities. Foreign programmes are routinely rejected or adapted to fit local conditions and in this sense the local ‘participants’ are the rational actors, rather than the ‘scientific’ planners. Resisting inappropriate plans amounts to an articulate protest against the usurpation of local autonomy; the audacity of peasants to question ‘experts’ demonstrates their self-esteem in their own knowledge and capabilities.226 Indeed, the awareness by indigenous peoples that their own knowledge is often contrary to, or at least differs, from Western knowledge frequently leads to a utilitarian adoption of the ‘development’ discourse alongside their own knowledge system so that there exist simultaneously two parallel systems of identity formation: the local and the non-local. This sly approach is hidden from the ‘experts’.227 Thus, the authoritarian neo-Malthusian policy to feed Ethiopia, following the famine of 1985, has floundered disastrously since its imposition. The result has been a reduction in agricultural productivity and a decimation of plots, which if not waterlogged are stripped of their surface soil or infested with rodents. For it was based upon an unfounded, undynamic view of local agrarian behaviour and a denigration of indigenous people’s interests and their farming practices of integrated cropping even in areas of high population densities: It was an approach that assumed peasants did not know what was good for them and would not necessarily participate in bringing about change without political agitation, education and, if necessary, coercion . . . But they, too, proved willing to go along with the programme and, at times, to agree with the narrative because they appreciated the grains and edible oils they received at well over market wage rates and because they had learned that it was politic to agree with official views.228 Indian farmers also learnt such ‘diplomacy’. The Green Revolution had been ‘an alliance between government, international agencies and transnational corporations in the agro-chemical industry’ imposed on farmers, bringing only a brief increase in productivity levels. Subsequent declines in agricultural production, to levels below those of the period before the use of high-yield crop varieties and attendant requirements of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and irrigated water, led the government to push this programme further, targeting indigenous farmers on small, marginal plots, who produce primarily for subsistence, and only second, for the market. Notwithstanding the vicious circle of toxic accumulation, water-logging, salinisation of water sources, loss of forest and biodiversity, depletion of fertility of exhausted soils


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and erosion of top soil, out-migration from rural communities, urbanisation and increasing government expenditure on agricultural subsidies, there remains a desperate attempt to ‘save’ the Green Revolution, which critics predict will bring India to a position of ‘food insecurity’.229 The inappropriateness of Western farming techniques (e.g., deep cultivation, soil inversion, clearance of tree cover) is no more acutely evident than in the Sahel of Africa, where indigenous farmers have always been wary of the direct causal link between desertification and ecologically insensitive cultivation practices and have applied a diverse range of precautions including planting a variety of crops of different moisture requirements and ensuring constant ground cover. The symbiotic role of agro-forestry in maintaining the micro-climate, protecting the soil from erosion and the cultural value of trees as medicines and symbols – in effect, the interdependence of survival in this harsh landscape – cannot be so easily dismissed as ‘primitive’, but merely displays a ‘profound ignorance and indicates a total lack of awareness of the ingenuity and skills of African farming communities’.230 The bias against local knowledge, based upon arrogant and misconceived stereotyping, hinders sustainable land use and policies. At the heart of ecological protest is a struggle for autonomy to control development:231 Africa’s food crisis is far less one of production than one of control over decisions about whose knowledge counts and whose needs and interests prevail. The power to allocate and control the direction of resources has enabled international and national elites to create the myth that their knowledge is superior to that of local peoples. The elite have claimed a monopoly on the knowledge to carry out ‘development’, and under the guise of that knowledge have justified their accumulation of Africa’s agricultural, mineral and human resources for their own uses.232 Meanwhile, indigenous farmers are subject to contradictory assumptions. They are targets of technical reform according to which they are expected to perform, whilst deemed incapable of participating in the policy formation. As a result, they are subject to political alienation precisely because they attempt to rationally respond to ambiguous orders from a disempowered position. Further, in producing for the global market, the rural poor of developing nations are deprived of land and crops for their own sustenance. It is for this reason that poverty and exploitation act as incitements to ecological protest. For indigenous people are concerned ‘to keep natural resources under communal, not market, control and resist the cremastic valorization of nature’.233 In indignation, indigenous people are bravely protesting. These are the words of an elder of the Krenak Indian tribe of Brazil: When the government took our land in the valley of Rio Doce, they wanted to give us another place somewhere else. But the state, the government will never understand that we do not have another place to go.

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples The only possible place for the Krenak people to live and to re-establish our existence, to speak to our Gods, to speak to our nature, to weave our lives is where God created us. It is useless for the government to put us in a very beautiful place, in a very good place with a lot of hunting and fish. The Krenak people, we continue dying and we die insisting that there is only one place for us to live. My heart does not become happy to see humanity’s incapacity . . . We cannot consider the planet as something isolated from the cosmic.234

So too the Penan people: Stop destroying the forest or we will be forced to protect it. The forest is our livelihood. We have lived here before any of you outsiders came. We fished in clean rivers and hunted in the jungle. We made our sago meat and ate fruit of the trees. Our life was not easy, but we lived in content. Now, the logging turn rivers into muddy streams and the jungle into devastation. The fish cannot survive in dirty rivers and wild animals will not live in devastated forest. You took advantage of our trusting nature and cheated us into unfair deals. You take away our livelihood and threaten our very lives. You make our people discontent. We want our ancestral land, the land we live off back. We can use it in a wiser way. When you come to us, come as guests, with respect.235 These voices go unheeded because the state denies indigenous peoples legal and political means to participate on equally valid terms. Further, it is not uncommon for the state to resort to brutal violence to quell resistance to reform.236 Sebastiao Salgado describes the occasion when unarmed rural Brazilians mobilised by the Movement for the Landless (MST) legally moved on to land in order to cultivate small individual plots. (Land distribution remains skewed to a few large landowners: half of cultivated land is owned by just 2 per cent of landowners.237) They were met by gunfire and machetes wielded by ‘police’ who have yet to be charged with the massacre of 19 people and attempted manslaughter of over 50 more.238 Nonetheless the MST has since grown in strength and audacity in its campaign for ‘land and justice’ and routinely takes over unoccupied land by cultivating it.239 Brutality against such resistance adds to the moral authority of ecological movements. Other examples of state coercion, abetted by global finance, against which indigenous peoples knowingly battle include that of the Botswana Government which has ordered the eviction of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, formerly a protected home to 1,000 people and land to another 2,000 indigenous people. Wildlife conservation, foreign tourism and diamond extraction are considered to have priority over a biodiverse habitat that is the life-base of the Kwe Bushmen. As one said,


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[t]he government has been trying for years to get rid of us. They say we disturb the wildlife, but it’s not a good reason to move us. We have always been there. It’s the diamonds; we’ve seen the machinery moving in.240 In India, ‘commando-style police forces’ have beaten, fired tear gas at and arrested around 1,500 people of the Narmada Valley who were protesting against the construction of a giant dam. A local campaigner said, ‘[t]his has clearly shown that the state machinery, administration and police are subservient to . . . national and international capital and private companies’. ‘Despite the police repression, the villagers have shown their readiness for a protracted struggle against the developer and the state government.’241 These examples demonstrate that there persists a contest that is not between equals: the ‘might of modern technology, backed by the power of the State’242 ensures that there remains a power-differentiated chasm between indigenous people of the ‘undeveloped’ regions of the world, who comprise the majority, and the global few who reap the economic riches of their labour. The World Health Organisation reports that the ‘disproportionate flow of resources from the developing to the developed because of debt servicing and repayment’, the fixing of prices to favour developed countries and Structural Adjustment Policies, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and/or World Bank all intensify the gulf between rich and poor peoples.243 These logics have led to a situation where every country in Africa has a negative balance of trade with their former coloniser; nine African countries rely on three crops for over 90 per cent of their income and the necessity of importing staple foods from developed countries.244 Indigenous people have been incorporated within the global economy by default and it has led to wholesale disaster: The inexorable processes of agriculture-industrialisation and internationalisation are probably responsible for more hungry people than either cruel or unusual whims of nature. There are several reasons why the high-technology-crop model increases hunger. Scarce land, credit, water and technology are pre-empted for the export market. Most hungry people are not affected by the market at all . . . The profits flow to corporations that have no interest in feeding hungry people without money.245 Resigned passivity is often a temporary psychological coping mechanism that arises in these constructed situations of hopelessness; when indigenous subjects have had power over life-affecting decisions taken from them and are rendered victims. Such images, naturally, anger rural Africans, whose experiences belie any notion of helplessness.246 This anger may be invisibly bubbling under surface appearances, if not immediately evident: My people have their own way of doing things . . . ‘The ones scrubbed in hot water’ could not see this when they came. They came – ‘the ones with

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples coloured eyes’ – and found my people living worthwhile lives that were satisfying to them. But the newcomers saw only indolence, ignorance and superstition . . . So began the destruction of my culture. So began our dying. . . . But my people are patient. We have a saying: ‘These mountains were here when we were born. They will be here long after we are gone’. Patiently my people observed the world of which they knew they were a part – equal with the land, the rivers, the trees, the mountains and every other living thing. Thus my people knew how to flow with nature’s rhythm, dance to its tune and harness its forces for their good. They knew about using and using up. They knew that rest is the beginning of restoration, that it brings healing.247

Protection of nature’s biodiversity is interdependent upon protection of the multiplicity of indigenous cultures and diversity of relationships with ecosystems that have evolved according to particularistic conditions throughout the ages. Indigenous peoples can see that their biodiverse landscapes are being eagerly sought and plundered for capital gain, because they have remained, until now, beyond reach: What they always said was true wealth – the natural world – is proving to be so even on the white man’s terms. Their nature, their environment, has become increasingly attractive simply because, against all the odds, they have managed to defend it.248 The significance of indigenous peoples is brought into focus. Since, the germ plasm of the world lies in the forests and fields of the Third World, either as old cultivated varieties of crops, or in the wild, the conservation of genetic resources lies in the hands of Third World Women, tribals and peasants.249 The notion of the capacity to possess the natural world is at the heart of indigenous resistance to the Western hegemony of capitalism abetted by Cartesian rationality. This necessarily incites, as an integral element, considerations of justice. However, since indigenous cultures and Western culture emanate from contrasting epistemologies, there exists a considerable gulf between understandings of justice, which arise precisely from ecological deliberations, as beautifully expressed by a South African, meditating upon her legacy: ‘The colour-eyed people hoarded it all. And the gold. And the land. To own. While we still wondered: how can a person claim a star as personal possession?’250 Possession of resources and revenue from those resources is easily understood in Western terms. So curtailment of the protest of the Ogoni people of

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 215 Nigeria who objected to the ‘rape of their land’ by foreign oil companies in alliance with the Nigerian state became a necessity to repress the debate on revenue distribution from exploited resources and that of the issue of local people’s exclusion from political decision-making.251 Similarly, the Brazilian rubber tappers’ movement mobilised by Chico Mendes was internationally acclaimed as environmental, but initially was more concerned with labour rights and redistribution of revenues: Beginning as a local struggle by a traditional extractivist population over land use rights, it became part of a broader movement for social justice and finally part of a global environmental struggle. Each of these frames made sense of the story for a different audience.252 The categorisation of this struggle by indigenous people from that of unjust relations to local resources to a protest of global environmental importance demonstrates an awareness of a global audience and potential support base. At the heart of this manoeuvre is the recognition that: the most direct threat to the rural population of Amazonia is not environmental destruction, but violence . . . It has been far more difficult to mobilise western public opinion on behalf of murdered peasants and labour organisers than it is on behalf of trees.253 Despite the rhetoric, justice is fundamental to ecological struggles254 and ecological solutions are inseparable from equitable social relations.255 The meagre economic resources of indigenous peoples are counter-balanced by deep reserves of courage and resolve. Some see the beginnings of the end of oppressive and unjust relations in these instances of resistance, despite the ‘formidable’ ‘forces of reaction and obscurantism’.256 The ‘day-to-day resistance to enclosure’ reveals the strength of disempowered people to reassert and regain common, rather than individual, rights to sustain their communities.257 To persist in believing only one side of the story, ‘the public transcript’, at the expense of the full story, which includes the subaltern, who have been socially constructed as void of meaning by those controlling global capital and power, continues the practice of objectification. This occurs irrespective of the reality that indigenous peoples are the majority who tread lightly upon earth. The ‘hidden transcripts’ to counter the ‘public transcript’258 need to be heard, for the consequences matter: in many Third World countries, the Green Revolution displaced ‘primitive’ and ‘coarse-grained’ seed varieties and ‘marginal’ and ‘inferior’ indigenous agricultural techniques. Unfortunately in the process, nutritional ‘weeds’ have also been eliminated, limiting the diet of indigenous peoples, reducing their capability to be selfsufficient. Bathua, a highly nutritious, green, leafy vegetable in India, is routinely chemically eliminated as a pest in wheat crops. However, this plant used to be an important source of vitamin A; every year, 40,000 children go

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blind due to vitamin A deficiency and the destruction of this once freely available source compounds this tragedy.259 As this example demonstrates, knowledge and survival are crucially interdependent; the questions of import are: Whose knowledge? How is this knowledge disseminated? Whose survival ensues? Indigenous people have never opposed the use of their plants to save lives. It is the way in which their information is stolen and made into a commodity which angers them. For example, the Uru-eu-wau-wau people in Brazil have a plant known as ‘tiki uba’ which has anti-coagulant properties. The company Monsanto has used this and is attempting to patent the genetic make-up of the plant. The Uru-eu-wau-wau are currently seeking, through the organization Cultural Survival, a way to oppose this commercialisation of their knowledge.260 Commercialisation of natural plants, framed by intellectual property rights that are skewed towards industrial monopolisation, will deny indigenous peoples’ involvement in knowingly cultivating such plants and also reaping the medicinal and economic benefits.261 Indigenous resistance to Western economisation of resources is thus ‘a non-violent response’ to the insidious war against biodiversity.262 From a cultural perspective, resistance also provides a powerful ideological force to provide momentum to survive and fight to survive, as the many stories recounted above testify. ‘In fact, the poorest people have to be the most innovative, since they have to create survival while it is threatened daily.’263 Evidently, indigenous people have a voice, even when they are being used and abused; even when they are ‘endangered’. A new danger, reinforcing political objectification, is the conceptualisation of them as rare biological resource. This view, countenanced by the HGDP (the Human Genome Diversity Project) disregards the reasons behind colonialist genocide and ethnocide, such as socioeconomic marginalisation, which make indigenous people so rare. It also regards the people not as a cultural community and individuals, but atomistically as composites of genes. These ‘objects of scientific study’ rightly ask: Why do they simply stand by as we die, and instead immortalize us in their gene banks. This type of research is immoral. It lowers our people to the status of living gene providers for the chemical industry.264 Opposition to this ‘manifestation of the commodification of the sacred’ and to external control via a reductionist approach to another’s life provide two powerful focal points for resistance. However, this should not be equated with an opposition to ‘science when it is co-operative, participative, controlled and transparent’. Indeed, in attempting to answer questions concerning human identity, the project is seen to be irrelevant to the concerns of indigenous peoples.265

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 217 So the struggle persists. The intellectual paucity to conceptually perceive relations in a holistic manner is translated into discriminatory injustice and incremental degradation of life forces according to a political philosophy of naturalised abuse. However, this case study has demonstrated that it is possible to broaden IR’s metaphysical horizons. Practically, indigenous peoples’ involvement within the decision-making process alleviates the negative energies required for conflict and opens up a dialogue concerning pursuit of the common good. Not only will a forum of inclusive dialogue ensue but also it will arise from the multiplicity of epistemologies contextualised by the diversity of ontological contexts and cosmological world-views existent in this rich world.

Notes 1 Gray, C. (1991) ‘The Impact of Biodiversity Conservation on Indigenous Peoples’, in Shiva, V., Anderson, P., Schücking, H., Gray, A., Lohmann, L. and Cooper, D. Biodiversity: Social and Ecological Perspectives, London: Zed Books. 2 Secretariat of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues (1987) Indigenous Peoples: A Global Quest for Justice, London: Zed Books. 3 Wearne, P. (1996) Return of the Indian: Conquest and Revival in the Americas, London: Cassel in association with Latin America Bureau. 4 Aware that my legitimacy as an outsider is problematic, I strive to be conscious of the limitations of the globalising language, English, and, whenever possible, allow illustrative examples to speak for themselves. 5 Secretariat of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, (1987) p. 11. 6 Díaz Polanco, H. (Rayas, L., trans.) (1997) Indigenous Peoples in Latin America: The Quest for Self-Determination, Oxford: Westview Press, p. x. 7 Gray, (1991) p. 61. 8 Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid (1996) The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. 9 World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 114–115. This is also the thesis of Norberg-Hodge, H. (1991) Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, London: Rider. 10 Wearne, (1996). 11 Hirsch, P. (1990) ‘Review Essay: Marginal People on Marginal Land’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 22, (4), 55–59. 12 Secretariat of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, (1987). 13 This is also particularly true of the sub-discipline, International Political Economy; Tooze, R. and Murphy, C. N. (1996) ‘The Epistemology of Poverty and the Poverty of Epistemology in IPE: Mystery, Blindness, and Invisibility’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 25 (3), 681–707. 14 Secretariat of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, (1987). 15 Goodman, D. and Redclift, M. (1991) Environment and Development in Latin America: The Politics of Sustainability, Manchester: Manchester University Press. 16 Cf. hooks, b. (1991) ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness’, in

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround; ‘language is also a place of struggle’, pp. 45–46. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge, p. 153. Gadgil, M. and Guha, R. (1995) Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India, London: Routledge, p. 3. Quoted by Baviskar, A. (1995) In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 233. Gellatley, J., with Tony Ward (1996) The Silent Ark: A Chilling Exposé of Meat – The Global Killer, London: Thorsons, p. 146. Rowell, A. (1997) ‘Crude Operators: The Future of the Oil Industry’, The Ecologist, 27 (3), 99–106. Johnson, C., Knowles, R. and Colchester, M. (1989) Rainforests: Land Use Options for Amazonia, Oxford University Press and WWF UK in association with Survival International, p. 27. Lehtinen, U. (1997) ‘Environmental Racism: The US Nuclear Industry and Native Americans’, The Ecologist, 27 (2), pp. 43–44. The president of Brazil quoted by Kuehls, T. (1996) Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics, London: University of Minnesota Press, p. ix. Hecht, S. and Cockburn, A. (1990) The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon, London: Penguin Books. Cleary, D. (1991) ‘The Greening of the Amazon’, in Goodman, D. and Redclift, M. Environment and Development in Latin America: The Politics of Sustainability, Manchester: Manchester University Press. The Japan Times (1989) cited by Colchester, M. (1993) ‘Forest Peoples and Sustainability’, in Colchester, M. and Lohmann, L. (eds) The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests, Penang, Sturminster Newton and London: The World Rainforest Movement, The Ecologist and Zed Books, p. 75. Colchester, (1993). Marglin, S. A. (1990) ‘Towards the Decolonization of the Mind’, in ApffelMarglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kothari, S. and Parajuli, P. (1993) ‘No Nature Without Social Justice: A Plea for Cultural and Ecological Pluralism in India’, in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books, p. 231. Vidal, J. (1996) ‘The dispossessed’, The Observer, 29 September 1996, ‘Forests for Life’, produced in association with WWF UK, p. 6. Shiva, V. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development, London: Zed Books. Seeds are being genetically modified by biotechnological companies to selfdestruct after their first harvest to prevent the natural cycle of reproduction and thereby force farmers to buy seeds each year from the seed company. The risk of cross-contamination to other plant and animal species has not yet been explored. Shiva, (1989). Shiva, V. and Third World Network (1993) Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, London: Zed Books, pp. 19–20. See the special issue of The Ecologist, (September/October 1988) 28 (5). Shiva, V. (1996) ‘The loser’s perspective’, in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid, The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid, (1996) The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications, ch. 5.

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 219 39 Stiefel, M. and Wolfe, M. (1994) A Voice for the Excluded. Popular Participation in Development: Utopia or Necessity?, London: Zed Books, p. 45. 40 Colchester, (1993) p. 73. 41 Dasmann, R., E. (1988) ‘Towards a Biosphere Consciousness’, in Worster, D. (ed.) The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 42 Stiefel and Wolfe, (1994) p. 40. 43 Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) p. 35. 44 Savyasaachi, (1993) ‘An alternative system of knowledge: fields and forests in Abujmarh’, in Banuri, T. and Apffel-Marglin, F. (eds) Who Will Save the Forests? Knowledge, Power, and Environmental Destruction, London: Zed Books, p. 57. 45 Marglin, S. A. (1996) ‘Farmers, Seedsmen, and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 46 Magona, S. (1992) ‘The scars of umlungu’,The New Internationalist, 230, p. 8. 47 De Saussure, F. (Bally, C., Sechehaye, A. and Reidlinger, A., eds; Baskin, W., trans.) (1960) Course in General Linguistics, London: Peter Owen. 48 Gadgil, M. and Guha, R. (1992), This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 221. 49 Gadgil and Guha, (1992) p. 177. 50 Dasmann, (1988) p. 279. 51 Vikas and Pradan, (1990) p. 105. 52 Escobar A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Chichester: West Sussex, Princeton University Press, p. 194. 53 Pearce, F. (1996) ‘Slash, burn and start again: The Amazon’, The Observer, 29 September 1996, ‘Forests for Life’ produced in association with WWF UK, 12–13. 54 Shankland, A. (1992) ‘Look here, Gringo!’, The New Internationalist, 230, p. 21. 55 Barraclough, S. L. and Ghimire, K. B. (1996) ‘Deforestation in Tanzania: Beyond Simplistic Generalizations’, The Ecologist, 26 (3), 104–109 found that intensive use of land had nothing to do with population density and more to do with whether land was farmed privately or commercially. 56 Gadgil and Guha, (1992); Banuri, T. and Apffel-Marglin, F. (1993b) ‘The environmental crisis and the space for alternatives, India, Finland and Maine’, in Who Will Save The Forests? Knowledge, Power, and Environmental Destruction, London: Zed Books Ltd. 57 Hong, E. (1987) Natives of Sarawak: Survival in Borneo’s Vanishing Forests, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia: Institut Masyarakat, p. 20. 58 Vikas, G. and Pradan (1990) ‘Communal Rights versus Private Profit: Tribal Peoples and Tea Plantations in Northeast India’, The Ecologist, 2 (3), 105–107; Ribeiro, R. G. ‘Ecological Consciousness in Amazonia: The Indigenous Experience’, in Boff, L. and Elizondo, V. (eds) (1995) Ecology and Poverty: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, London: Stichting Concilium Press. 59 Vikas and Pradan, (1990) p. 107. 60 Jarosz, L. (1996) ‘Defining Deforestation in Madagascar’, in Peet, R. and Watts, M. (eds) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge, p. 155. 61 The Ecologist (1993) Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons, London: Earthscan. 62 Escobar, (1995). 63 Also Apffel-Marglin, F. (1996a) ‘Rationality and the World’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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64 Escobar, (1995); Gran, G. (1986) ‘Beyond African Famines: Whose Knowledge Matters?’ Alternatives XI, 275–296. 65 Shiva and Third World Network, (1993). 66 Escobar, (1995). 67 Hobart, M. (ed.) (1993) An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, London: Routledge. 68 Gadgil and Guha, (1995), p. 142. 69 Pigg, S. L. (1992) ‘Inventing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development In Nepal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 491–513, pp. 506–7. 70 Gran, (1986). 71 M. Taussig quoted in Escobar, (1995) p. 153. 72 The Report of The Commission on Global Governance (1995) Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 29. This is also the thesis of the WCED (1987). 73 Banuri, T. (1993) ‘The Landscape of Diplomatic Conflicts’, in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. 74 Escobar, (1995). 75 Shiva, (1989) p. 43. 76 Shiva, (1996). 77 CSE (1982) The State of India’s Environment, New Delhi: Centre for Science and the Environment, quoted by Colchester, (1993) p. 79. 78 Tandon, Y. (1993) ‘Village contradictions in Africa’, in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. 79 Baviskar, (1995) p. 32. 80 Shiva, (1989). 81 Cf. Norberg-Hodge, (1991). 82 This was the case for the family I stayed with in Ladakh; the father of the family worked in the military and was away from the family home for ten months of the year. 83 Goldsmith, Z. (1998) ‘Back to the Future in Rajasthan’, The Ecologist, 28 (4), 222–227. 84 Shiva, (1989) p. 220. 85 Guha, R. (1996) ‘Two Phases of American Environmentalism: A Critical History’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing knowledge, From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 86 Banuri, T. (1990b) ‘Modernization and its Discontents: A Cultural Perspective on the Theories of Development’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 87 Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Technology and the Reproduction of Values in Rural Western India’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Dominating Knowledge, Development, Culture and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 188 and 214, respectively. 88 Colchester, (1993) p. 61. 89 The Ecologist, (1993) p. 16. 90 Vikas and Pradan, (1990); Colchester, (1993). 91 Netting, R. McC. (1997) ‘Unequal Commoners and Uncommon Equity: Property and Community Among Smallholder Farmers’, The Ecologist, 27 (1), 28–33. 92 The Ecologist, (1993) 93 Nsiah-Gyabaah, K. (1994) ‘Land Degradation and Society in Northern Ghana’, in Redclift, M. and Sage, C. (eds) Strategies for Sustainable Development: Local Agendas for the South, Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons; Bebbington, A., (1996) ‘Movements, Modernizations, and Markets: Indigenous

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Organizations and agrarian strategies in Ecuador’, in Peet, R. and Watts, M., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge. In Ladakh decision making is by village or hamlet whereby the men congregate at a central point, for example, under a prominent tree on a Sunday morning, whenever community decisions need to be made. For example, the allocation, by household, of use of the community’s water-powered grain mill. Baviskar, (1995) reports that in India at least 22.7 million hectares of forest have been felled over the last 15 years and each year 6 billion tons of topsoil is lost (pp. 28–29). Agarwal, A. and Narain, S. (1997) ‘Dying Wisdom: The Decline and Revival of Traditional Water Harvesting’, The Ecologist, 27 (3), 112–116. Baviskar, (1995) p. 35. World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 95. Plant, R. (1993) ‘Background to Land Reform: Latin America, Asia, and Africa’, in Colchester, M. and Lohmann, L. (eds) The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests, Penang, Sturminster Newton and London: The World Rainforest Movement, The Ecologist and Zed Books Ltd. Schoonmaker Freuenberger, K. (1995) ‘Don’t fence me in’, The New Internationalist, 266, 14–16. Anon (1993) ‘Hills of Shame’, The New Internationalist, 241, 20–22. Examples given to illustrate these points in Colchester, M. and Lohmann, L. (eds) (1993) The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests, Penang, Sturminster Newton and London: The World Rainforest Movement, The Ecologist and Zed Books Ltd. Guha, R. (1993) ‘The Malign Encounter: The Chipko Movement and Competing Visions of Nature’, in Banuri, T. and Apffel-Marglin, F. (eds) Who Will Save the Forests? Knowledge, Power, and Environmental Destruction, London: Zed Books Ltd. Guha, R. (1997) ‘The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of AntiHumanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World’, The Ecologist, 27 (1), 14–19. Gadgil and Guha, (1995). Example given by Gadgil and Guha, (1995); a three-year study had failed to discover the reason for declining returns from bamboo harvests. The wage labourers/local people had not questioned the ‘superior knowledge’ of their paymasters, although bamboo had been harvested for centuries in the region. Doty, R. L. (1996) Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North–South Relations, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Shiva, V. (1992b) ‘Global Bullies: Tread Gently on the Earth’, New Internationalist 230, p. 26. This is also said in Shiva, V. (1994) ‘Conflicts of Global Ecology: Environmental Activism in a Period of Global Reach’, Alternatives, 19, 195–207, p. 199. Apffel-Marglin, (1996a). Apffel-Marglin, F. (1996b) ‘Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production to Regeneration’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Colchester, (1993). Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) pp. 9–12. Apffel-Marglin, (1996a) p. 2; Shiva and Third World Network, (1993). Goldsmith, E. (1997a) ‘Development as Colonialism’, The Ecologist, 27(2), 69–76.

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115 Moore, D. S. (1996) ‘Marxism, Culture, and Political Ecology: Environmental struggles in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands’, in Peet, R. and Watts, M. (eds) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge. 116 Rau, B. (1991) From Feast to Famine: Official Cures and Grassroots Remedies to Africa’s Food Crisis, London: Zed Books Ltd. 117 Colchester, M. (1996) ‘Indigenous peoples’ responses to bioprospecting’, in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F., and Pimbert, M. (eds) The Life Industry, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. 118 Martínez Alier in Escobar, (1995) p. 201. 119 Specifically these were the conclusions of the Brundtland Report, World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). 120 Singh, N. and Titi, V. (eds) (1995) Empowerment for Sustainable Development: Toward Operational Strategies, London: Zed Books. 121 Shiva, (1996) p. 120. 122 Rau, (1991). 123 Shiva, (1996). 124 Baumann et al., (1996) p. 137; Wearne, (1996) p. 159. 125 Shiva, (1996) p. 120. 126 See Corpus, V. (Cordillera People’s Alliance, the Philippines) (1996) ‘Indigenous peoples’ reactions to the HGDP’, p. 147, and Argumedo, A. (Indigenous peoples’ network on biodiversity) (1996) ‘Indigenous peoples’ reactions to the HGDP’, both in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid, The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications, discussed further in next section. 127 Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) p. 19. 128 Banuri, T. (1990a) ‘Development and the Politics of Knowledge: A Critical Interpretation of the Social Role of Modernization Theories in the Development of the Third World’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 66. 129 Stiefel and Wolfe, (1994) p. 241. 130 Gran, (1986) p. 278. 131 Rau, (1991) p. 4. 132 Guha, R. (1991) The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 98. 133 Villager quoted by Guha, (1993) p. 100. 134 Guha, (1997). 135 Zimmerer, (1996). 136 Escobar, (1995) p. 169. 137 Hong, (1987) pp. 135 and 37, respectively. 138 Colchester, (1993). 139 Tandon, (1993), p. 218. 140 Zimmerer, K. S. (1996) ‘Discourses on Soil Loss in Bolivia: Sustainability and the search for the socioenvironmental “middle ground” ’, in Peet, R. and Watts, M. (eds) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge, p. 116. 141 Shiva and Bandyopadhyay quoted in Baviskar, (1995) p. 44. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) discuss ‘the life-enhancing paradigm’ that informs indigenous knowledge. 142 Colchester, (1993). 143 Cited by the Coordinating Body for Indigenous People’s Organizations of the Amazon Basin (1992) ‘Wise Managers’, The New Internationalist, 230, p. 27. 144 Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) pp. 34–36. 145 Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) ch. 3: ‘The heritage of fire’.

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples 223 146 Flannery, T. F. (1994) The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People, Chatswood, NSW: Australia, Reed Books. 147 Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) p. 36. 148 Interview with Ailton Krenak in Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) pp. 241–242. 149 Rau, (1991) p. 146. 150 Gupta, A. K., Patel, K. K., Pastakia, A. R. and Vijaya Sherry Chand, P. G. (1995) ‘Building upon local creativity and entrepreneurship in vulnerable environments’, in Singh, N. and Titi, V. (eds) Empowerment: Towards Sustainable Development, London: Zed Books. 151 Mann, (1990) p. 51. 152 Cf. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993). 153 Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) pp. 14–15. 154 Baumann et al., (1996) pp. 3–4. 155 Gupta et al., (1995) p. 135. 156 Banuri, T. and Apffel-Marglin, F. (1993a) ‘A systems of knowledge analysis of deforestation’, in Who Will Save the Forests? Knowledge, Power and Environmental Destruction, London: Zed Books. 157 Vidal, (1996) p. 7. 158 Dei, G. J. S. (1995) ‘Indigenous knowledge as an empowerment tool for sustainable development’, in Singh, N. and Titi, V. (eds) Empowerment: Towards Sustainable Development, London: Zed Books, p. 149. 159 Gupta et al., (1995). 160 Kothari, S. and Parajuli, P. (1993) ‘No nature without social justice: A plea for cultural and ecological pluralism in India’; also Lohmann, L. (1993) ‘Resisting Green Globalism’; both in Sachs, W. (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena for Political Conflict, London: Zed Books. 161 Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) p. 59. 162 Patkar, M. (1992) ‘Armada against Narmada’, The New Internationalist, 230, 16. 163 Osmarino Amancio Rodrigues interviewed in Hecht and Cockburn, (1990). 164 Shankland, A. (1992) ‘Look here, gringo!’, The New Internationalist, 230, 22. 165 Quoted in Johnson, C., Knowles, R. and Colchester, M. (1989) Rainforests: Land Use Options for Amazonia, Oxford: Oxford University Press and WWF UK in association with Survival International. 166 Shiva, (1996). 167 Escobar, (1995); Hecht and Cockburn, (1990). 168 Youngs, G. (1997) ‘Culture and the Technological Imperative: Missing dimensions’, in Talalay, M., Farrands, C. and Tooze, R. (eds) Technology, Culture and Competitiveness: Change and the World Political Economy, London: Routledge, p. 39. 169 Youngs, (1997). 170 Southern Networks for Development (SONED) (1991) SONED on UNCED: A Southern Perspective on the Environment and Development Crisis, Geneva and Nairobi: SONED. 171 Ailton Krenak interviewed in Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) p. 242. 172 Haraway, D. (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Grossberg, L, Nelson, C., Treichler, P. A., Baughman, L. and MacGregor Wise, J. (eds) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 309–311 and p. 314. 173 Marglin, (1990) pp. 16 and 26. 174 Bebbington, (1996). 175 Wearne, (1996) pp. 154–157. 176 Nsiah-Gyabaah, (1994). 177 Banuri, (1990b). 178 Rau, (1991).

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Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples Khor Kok Peng, M. (1992) ‘Nero’s Children’, New Internationalist, 230, p. 26. Lohmann, (1993) pp. 157–158. Rau, (1991). Dei, (1995). Victor Flores Campero, peasant leader quoted by Zimmerer, (1996) p. 119. Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, London: Yale University Press, p. 29. Scott, J. C. (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, London: Yale University Press. Gran, (1986), p. 294. Rau, (1991) p. 148. An example of protest against commercial eucalyptus tree plantations in Thailand retold by Colchester, (1993) p. 85. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) p. 29. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) and Colchester, (1993). Guha, (1991) ch. 7. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) p. 20. Rangan, H., (1996) ‘From Chipko to Uttaranchal: Development, environment, and social protest in the Garhwal Himalayas, India’, in Peet, R. and Watts, M. (eds) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, London: Routledge, pp. 220 and 216, respectively. Baviskar, (1995) p. 237. Guha, (1991) p. 196. Tonkin, B. (1997) ‘Let my people go; Sebastiao Salgado’s latest photographic project, “Terra: struggle of the landless”, focuses on the plight of exploited Brazilian peasants’, The Independent (Tabloid) 15 September 1997, p. 9. ‘The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development’, in United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, (1992) Earth Summit ’92: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro 1992, London: The Regency Press Corporation; specifically Principle 22, p. 13. United Nations World Conference on Human Rights (1993) World Conference on Human Rights: The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, June 1993; with the opening statement of United Nations Secretary, General Boutros BoutrosGhali, New York: United Nations; specifically Principles 20, p. 35 and Principle 31, p. 52, ‘urge States to ensure’ the rights of indigenous people. Vienna Declaration, para. 2 quoted by Boyle, K. (1995) ‘Stock-taking on Human Rights: The World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna 1993’, in Beetham, D. (ed.) Political Studies, (Special issue: Politics and Human Rights) 43, 79–95, p. 93. Boyle, (1995). Colchester, (1996). Rau, (1991). Baviskar, (1995). Mann, (1990) p. 53. Savyasaachi, (1993). Escobar, (1995) p. 223. Paktar, (1992), p. 17. Escobar, (1995) p. 194. Paktar, (1992) p. 17. Baviskar, (1995). Anon., (1993). Nellithanam, R. and Nellithanam, J. (1998) ‘Return of the Native Seeds’, The Ecologist, 28(1), 29–33, p. 33. Apffel-Marglin, F. (1997) ‘Counter-Development in the Andes’, The Ecologist, 27(6), 221–224.

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Kothari and Parajuli, (1993) p. 198. Dei, (1995). Tandon, Y. (1994) ‘Recolonization of Subject Peoples’, Alternatives, 19, 173–183. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993). Gadgil and Guha, (1992); this dividing practice is not adopted widely by Third World commentators; for example, Shiva is explicit that the Chipko movement is environmental. Rangan, (1996). Baviskar, (1995) p. 239. Baviskar, (1995) p. 232. Colchester, (1993), p. 95. Gupta et al., (1995). Dei, (1995). Omo-Fadaka, J. (1991) ‘African Development Revisited’, in Suliman, M. (ed.) Alternative Strategies for Africa: Environment – Women (vol. 2), p. 33. Rau, (1991). Escobar, (1995). Hoben, A. (1997) ‘The Cultural Construction of Environmental Policy: Paradigms and Politics in Ethiopia’, The Ecologist, 27(2), 55–62, p. 57. Nellithanam, R. and Nellithanam, J. (1998) ‘Return of the Native Seeds’, The Ecologist, 28(1), pp. 29–33, p. 33. Mann, R. D. (1990) ‘Time Running Out: The Urgent Need for Tree Planting In Africa’, The Ecologist, 20 (2), 48–53, p. 51. Mearns, R. (1995) ‘Environmental Entitlements: Towards empowerment for sustainable development’, in Singh, N. and Titi, V. (eds) Empowerment: Towards Sustainable Development, London: Zed Books. Rau, (1991) p. 180. Escobar, (1995) p. 201. Banuri and Apffel-Marglin, (1993a) p. 17. Colchester, M. (1992, 2nd ed.) Pirates, Squatters and Poachers: The Political Ecology of Dispossession of the Native Peoples of Sarawak, London: A Report from Survival International for the Rights of Threatened Tribal Peoples, Institute of Social Analysis, p. 42. An example being the Marcos regime’s bombardment of village communities following an escalation of violence in opposition to a World Bank sponsored dam that threatened to displace 80,000 people from their ancestral lands; Colchester, (1993) pp. 85–86. Schomberg, W. (1997) ‘Brazilian peasants march for land’, The Independent, 19 April 1977, p. 19. Tonkin, B. (1997) ‘Let my people go’, The Independent (Tabloid), 15 April 1997, p. 9. Schomberg, (1997). Anon (1998) ‘Bushmen of the Kalahari Evicted’, The Ecologist (Campaigns and News), 28 (3), p. 3. Anon (1998) ‘Violence Erupts Over Maheshwar Dam’, The Ecologist (Campaigns and News 28 (3), p. 3. Hong, (1987) p. 87, with reference to the Natives of Sarawak versus the timber industry. World Health Organization (1995) Bridging the Gaps quoted by Gellatley, (1996) p. 159. Mihevc, J. and Third World Network (1995) The Market Tells Them So: The World Bank and Economic Fundamentalism in Africa, London: Zed Books, Ltd., pp. 185–186. Barnet, R. J. quoted by Shiva, (1989) pp. 10–11. Also quoted in Shiva, V. in

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246 247 248 249 250 251

252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265

Ecological relations: the case of indigenous peoples association with Bandyopadhyay, J., Pandurang Hegde, Krishnamurthy, B. V., Kurien, J., Narendranath, G., Vanaja Ramprasad and Seddy, S. T. S. For The United Nations University (1991) Ecology and the Politics of Survival, London: Sage Publications, p. 347. Rau, (1991). Magona, (1992) p. 8. Wearne, (1996) p. 160. Shiva, (1989) p. 140. Magona, (1992) p. 9. Steel, J. (1995) ‘Suppression of the rape of the Niger Delta has been sordid and violent’, The Guardian, 11 November, 1995, p. 3. Osaghae, E. E. (1995) ‘The Ogoni Uprising: Oil Politics, Minority agitation and the future of the Nigerian State’, African Affairs, 94, 325–344. Keck, M. E. (1995) ‘Social Equity and Environmental Politics in Brazil. Lessons from the Rubber Tappers of Acre’, Comparative Politics, 27 (4), 409–424, p. 410. Cleary, (1991) pp. 128–129. Hecht and Cockburn, (1990) p. 239. Guha, (1993). Tandon, (1993), p. 222. The Ecologist, (1993) p. 197. Scott, (1990); notice the plurality of the ‘hidden’/local transcripts and singular form of the ‘public’/global transcript. Shiva and Third World Network, (1993) pp. 25–26. Gray, (1991) p. 67. Wearne, (1996) pp. 157–159. Shiva, in association with Bandyopadhyay et al., (1991) p. 349. Shiva, (1996) p. 122. Corpus, (1996) p. 147. Argumedo, (1996) pp. 145–146.

Conclusion Towards an inclusive politics of the earth

Yet at the conclusion of their sermons, in which the inevitability of the End – of industrialization, of civilization, of man, of life on this planet – is convincingly described if not proved, another way forward is presented. The ecologists end up by appealing to the rationality of their readers; if everyone would grasp what is at stake, then – apparently – everything would not be lost. These sudden about-turns smack of conversion rhetoric. The horror of the predicted catastrophe contrasts sharply with the mildness of the admonition with which we are allowed to escape. This contrast is so obvious and so central that both sides of the argument undermine each other. At least one of them fails to convince. Either the final exhortation, which addresses us in mild terms, or the analysis which is intended to alarm us.1

It is hoped that the argument presented here avoids this fault. Throughout this book I have argued that IR, as currently theorised and practised, deliberately misses the full picture of relations upon earth. Such a restrictive epistemological and paradigmatic basis not only does injustice to the integrity of the lives of those omitted relations, namely women, nonhuman animals and indigenous peoples, but also further intensifies the socially constructed isolation of those who benefit. Politics conducted from such a powerfully constructed yet ecologically and socially precarious epistemological base does not logically have the ability to perceive the interdependent ontological relationships that we have with earth and with each other. The cosmological insecurity of Western-educated people that manifests itself in ambitious attempts to conquer the depths and extremes of life, genetically and spatially, is a continuation of Baconian control and short-termist use and may only be appeased when nature and culture are recognised as mutually constitutive and interdependent spheres of life. To reside at ease on earth, in harmony with all biological and cultural diverse relations, humanity needs to begin with a perceived reverence for the fact that earth is the home of all and that no body can truly exist in isolation. The discipline of IR, in essence, was constructed upon this latter premise; that competition and/or co-operation with others is an inevitability. However, instead of conceptually fragmenting the world and generalising all within society as conforming to

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the ideal, represented by the most vociferously powerful, I have drawn my argument from the multitude of difference that is the sum of the international. The acceptance of the ecosphere as home is psychologically comforting in its unwavering tangibility as a concept, whilst also providing an ontological context of diversity from which emanates life in its variety of manifestations. As a consequence, epistemological articulations of how life could be organised upon earth differ. The possible theoretical framework proffered here is inclusive for it opens up an expansive conceptual space at the centre of political debate for the plurality of relations as subjects worthy of participating. The dynamics of political debate arise from the diversity of the epistemologies espoused by autonomous subjects, self-consciously striving for subjective justice within an interdependent world of finite resources and not from the totalising demand of a dichotomous push towards submission. Such a theorisation necessarily challenges the legitimacy of modernist mythology that imputes sovereignty as atomistic and exclusive to socially preordained subjects. In re-drawing the parameters of the theoretical structure, so are power relations reconstituted.2 The contingent realities of the participating subjects provide the specific points of genesis of theoretical construction, rather than abiding by the regulations that originated at a certain point in the history of Western philosophy, with the emergence of the modern, Cartesian cogito. That ‘ethnospecific narrative field called Western philosophy’ cognitively enabled a minority of the world to epistemologically construct a world of ‘subjects and objects’ whereby the former ‘were reputed to be the finest and most stable actors and actants in the Greatest Story Ever Told – the one about modernity and man’.3 At the international level, this has legitimised the accumulation of material wealth in developed countries ‘at the expense of Third World poverty and degradation’.4 The theoretical challenge is to reconstitute politicisation for all, without necessarily linking a moral superiority to inherited epistemological constructions, nor romanticising material poverty and thereby imposing a philosophy of the submissive internalisation of suffering. The latter may be ecologically useful, yet may perpetuate social injustices;5 disempowered people and an environment valued purely in a utilitarian fashion have for too long been absorbing violence. To allow for pluralistic politicisation informed by the diverse epistemologies of subjects residing in different ecological and cultural contexts entails the dissolution, ideologically, of Western-style consumerist standards. This in turn means that a ‘levelling up’ to Western lifestyles, which are in comparison profligate of the earth’s resources and capacities,6 is diffused by ecologically respectful epistemologies. Furthermore, control of access to the resources for life, not infrequently upheld by state-sanctioned violence – a phenomenon that is perpetuated daily at all levels of society, from the domestic home to the global whole – may be challenged, with theoretical legitimation as well as with practical resistance. As it currently stands, the discipline of IR is bereft of a theory to include, without subsuming difference, all relations within the international sphere,


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that is earth. Thus a possible method of theoretically including relations outside the norm of the masculinist, Western and able-bodied, adult human consumer is found within Michel Foucault’s critique of power relations. The methodological template, outlined in Chapter 3, provides a way to recognise the contextual ontology of political subjects within their local ecological and cultural environment, whilst also perceiving the struggles of subjects due to differing, socially constructed power arrangements. The genealogical transcendence, implied by the four-part methodology, by integral beings as individuals and as interdependent members of a community for a position of emancipated subjectivity, is a political movement of collective resistance and integral self-possession. Furthermore, it represents a cosmological reorientation of politics to a pre-Cartesian, pre-Baconian philosophical attitude of acceptance of organic inseparability. It entails a rejection of modernist conceptual frameworks of thinking and being that constrain all epistemologies to a monologist tradition and that reduces all life-forms to fit dichotomous binaries, which emanate, in turn, from the original axis of nature versus civilisation. By placing the focus explicitly and directly upon the diversity of subjects, any tendency to universalise identities and to project in linear fashion a political outcome is problematised. For the multitude of subjects is conceptually prioritised, rather than the modern rationality; theorisation is constructed after and according to the subjects, rather than making the subjects fit the theory. Thus, the omission of subjects of agency mutually interacting with the social constructions of theory, within Stephen Walt’s US-centric article, ‘International Relations: One World, Many Theories’ – heralded as representative of the frontier of knowledge of this discipline, allows for a demonstration of IR’s self-reified exclusivity, intellectually and culturally.7 Conventionally, Walt regards the academic discipline through three competing, if ‘somewhat permeable’, theoretical lenses – namely, realism, liberalism and constructivism (as the latest and radical paradigm) – all of which contribute understanding of this ‘one world’, but concludes ‘realism remains the most compelling general framework’.8 The metaphysical acceptance of the fundamental nature/politics divorce remains axiomatic; the ‘real world’ is that inhabited by policy makers and thus inherently socially constructed according to the heritage of normalised philosophy and activity, from which the only theoretical options are realism or liberalism. In contrast, it has been argued that ‘enviromanticism’ is a ‘powerful politics’, which ‘could send passions spilling across national as well as intellectual boundaries’.9 Transcending and appealing to both left and right spectrums of political debate, this challenges both realist and liberalist theoretical paradigms, which implicitly and uncritically accept the epistemological foundation of economic growth, underpinned by the notions of utilitarianism, infinite ecological resources and linear progression. As seen previously, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, an early example of an ecological perspective, where land is regarded as a community with derivative ethical and cultural facets,

230 Conclusion: towards an inclusive politics of the earth easily counters this metasupposition.10 For the metaphysical separation of nature and culture – the epistemological axis of theorisation and politicisation – overlooks the realisation that nature is overlain with cultural meaning and is fundamentally ‘home – and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places. Often there are places that are difficult and remote, but all are known and even named’.11 By association, the approach of this work also avoids both charges of ‘reductionism’, as understood in conventional metatheoretical terms, meaning the discernment of the whole by means of the study of its constitutive elements, and accusations of ‘systemic’ analysis, which identifies the level of interaction of these discrete units as distinct with autonomous effects.12 For such a dualistic analytical tension either fails, in the first case, to theorise the whole by focusing upon atomistic states as individuals or, in the second case, marginalises the substantive agency of internal forces within the international system.13 The courage to leave normalised secure and comforting, because historically legitimised, theoretical foundations is provided logically by the consciousness of an ecological perspective to IR and, methodologically, by Michel Foucault’s carefully researched and abundantly published revelations of the socially constructed powers of disciplining modes of thought and behaviour. An ecological perspective regards nature as an organic system with intrinsic value – the whole and its interdependent elements. Thus humans are one vital element inextricably bound to the biological as well as social regenerative dynamics within the ecosystem. As a consequence, normative policies should reflect an ethos that promotes life in its fullest conception. Ecocentrism may be articulated and conceptualised by humans but this fact does not necessarily translate into an anthropocentric blinkered vision. Instead, the emphasis is upon the interdependent relationships between living forces and how these are mediated by purely anthropocentric, frequently androcentric and ethnocentric, social relations of power. Thus, the interlocking oppressive epistemologies of speciesism, race and gender that present themselves as one formidable discourse are fragmented and made accessible to reinterpretation in more inclusive terms of reference; no one body need ‘negotiate the chasm’ between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ since such dualistic world-views are no longer valid constructions.14 The metadiscourse proffered here differs from the project of recognising the naturalised underside of dualisms,15 rejects the reversal of paradigmatic norms16 and does not choose to speak from the silenced, oppositional realm of political struggle which allows for the articulation of suffering;17 it differs from an acceptance of epistemological dualism as foundational and reformulates less exclusionary political praxis from contextualised contingencies. For the former positions inherently hold on to the foundation of metaphysical separation. The argument presented here uses and discards the primary epistemological step of objectification, relegating the need to hold on to the site of resistance to empower politicisation.


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Furthermore, the metatheory proposed involves a distancing from the Cartesian epistemological position by means of four ways of perceiving socio-political relationships, so that the comfort (for some) of epistemological binaries is rendered further removed. Consequently, the genealogical perspective illustrates our former epistemological separateness from our ecological relations, the consequent ontological injustices of this epistemological construction and the possibilities of repairing political epistemologies in line with the pluralistic diversity existent on earth. This is founded upon an ecological and cosmological realisation that the failure to ‘understand and respect the ways in which our own activities interlock with the operation of the natural world’ leads to the inability to cognitively and cosmologically comprehend the concepts of ‘just supply’ and ‘Relation’; ‘just at that moment in history when all our practical ways of thinking more urgently require a proper sense of “cohærence” and “Relation” ’.18 This responds to Christine Sylvester’s projected hope for a ‘differencetolerant IR’ grounded upon ‘a method of empathetic cooperation’ reaching for ‘inclusion’; To quote her, ‘[w]e certainly want more than to be assigned the homelessness of homelands we did not freely negotiate for ourselves, and the passes that go with them, and less than a violent take-over’. 19 This book also concurs with Frédérique Apffel-Marglin’s notion of ‘enactive cognition’ which confounds the universalised application of the Western, Cartesian rationale to politics and asks the theorist to recognise the heterogeneity of the political community:20 When we begin to refashion political community on relations of ‘identity in difference’, which eschew the dominating, unifying, and harmonizing impulses of the modern state, we are faced with the central task of rethinking who and what constitutes ‘we’ in our conceptions of political community. This process involves rejecting not only the idea of nature, and those associated with it, as a screen, ground, or resource, but also anthropomorphic and androcentric notions of agency, either projected on nature or used as a standard to which all actors are supposed to conform for membership in a political community. Broadening the notion of agency, beyond the ‘man-self’, his consciousness, his interests, and his actions, broadens the number and heterogeneity of actors in the world that constitutes ‘our’ community. When these other actors from the ‘natural’ world are included in the calculus, not on man’s terms or on the basis of equally problematic romantic and transcendental projections, the boundaries and purposes of political community become more ambiguous and, thus, less intolerant and hubristic.21 To perceive the multiplicity of ‘our’ earth community necessarily entails the broadening of IR. That the lead in reconstructing theory has been taken by women is not surprising and may be the result of our ‘historical . . .

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positioning in particular cognitive and political structures of science, race, and gender’.22 Theoretical progression has also been called for on the basis of its failure to consider ‘embedded and assumed notions of objectivity’ and, correspondingly, to accommodate ‘subtle and complex views of subjectivity’.23 It is hoped that this project goes some way towards this identified need to widen the Western metaphysics of politicisation to a trans-cultural epistemology which would include complex ‘multiples of agency’ within a ‘general language debate’ of ethics; where ‘agency and ontologies are the roots but we see epistemologies as branches, not as a single trunk; that generality is possible and that this is not a relativist cul-de-sac, and that the exploration of generality is a complexly arrived-at rendezvous of work involving entire systems of thought’.24 Both an ecological perspective and the revealed Foucauldian methodology could be said to be ‘entire systems of thought’, that is, they are holistic, pervasive and free of limiting boundaries, which could send the theorist flailing between the two academic chasms of generality and relativism. However, the ecological insistence upon local context and interdependence and the Foucauldian playfulness with discourse, alongside a conceptual hold on the subject, challenges one to avoid these theoretical morasses. Throughout I have implicitly promoted ER, that is, ecological relations, and demonstrated that IR is subsumed within such an expansive re-cognisation of the discipline. To construct another dichotomous framework or set up an alternative metatheoretical binary – ER/IR – would be antithetical to the ethos of this project. Rather, the aim here is purposefully provocative: to unsettle IR; to force into the open thinking about the nature of knowledge that undergirds politicisation and IR. For the exclusive and arbitrary boundaries – constructed and historically and philosophically reified to benefit specific socio-cultural, patriarchal, human interests – that inscribe disciplines have been allowed to assume ontological, besides epistemological, import. Thus, on the one hand, I am proposing an ecological revisioning of IR but, on the other hand, the method of perceiving politicisation (that is the process of politics, for politics is a movement and never stationary) is fundamental. Together, the content and method challenge IR on a number of levels: the universalisation of Western philosophical and political premises, the permanence of epistemological constructs and the logos of linear rationale. Indeed, the act of writing and reading this book is illustrative of these points for the case studies should be seen as concentric and intertwining realms which merge and cannot be read without reference to the other two cases, such is the universalised pervasiveness of the naturalisation of political omission and oppression, from which self-conscious politicisation grows. Furthermore, the open and inclusive nature of an ecological reading of relations problematises not only the boundaries of the discipline IR, but also renders difficult the act of presenting a linear argument. This was found to be so particularly with Chapter 2, where the case for an ecological perspective is


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presented; for in describing the perspective no definite line of argument is proposed, but the hope is to display a palette of colour, a realm of consciousness, in all its shades and possible articulations. The porous and arbitrary nature of socially constructed limitations is manifested daily in the biological world that is inseparable from the cultural existence of life. Foucault’s attitude of playfulness with terms allows one to constantly question constructions. Unearthing this subversive methodology, which shakes the terms of political engagement by playing with discursive techniques, thereby creates an opening and a momentum for breaking free of epistemological constraints and widening the political debate, without presenting another dogma. For he urged us to refuse to submit to the double bind of human subjection, that is the externally imposed objectifying processes, such as the totalising practice of naturalisation and the internally ascribed normalisation of our behaviour according to such modes of thought. In freeing ourselves, an ‘ethos’ and ‘practice’ of change is manifested, liberating also theorisation, incalculating an ‘attitude’, of positive hope for an inclusive politicisation of the participants of our community, for whom interdependence with earth is an ontological foundation to life which, in turn, informs diverse and localised epistemologies. The hope is that, to paraphrase Roland Bleiker, the limits of habits have been transgressed and unsettled.25 The politics of this continuous act of keeping open the notion of communal and individual constitution is poststructuralist, locating this IR theory within the ‘third debate’ emergent from the project of modernity. For ‘[e]xtending from the question of the political is a range of important ethical questions pertaining to relations across boundaries’.26 Thus ER is conceptually open and diffuse, whilst at the same time rooted in the ontological realities of specific, locally-contextualised subjects. It is hoped that the case studies are self-explanatory in terms of the convergence of metatheory and method, which constitutes ER as metanarrative, demonstrating the assimilation of political theory and practice and providing inspiration for the possibility of paradigmatic evolution towards an inclusive politics of all existent upon earth. This theoretical perspective may enable the attempt to attain ‘ecological literacy’27 and hold out the potential for political praxis that does not underestimate the historically structured obscurantist and exclusive tendencies, but allows for an inclusive politicisation of all dialectically interdependent relations upon earth. The similitude of Western political philosophy with IR theory to resemble the practice of global relations28 reveals the persistence of the ‘irrational’ gap, identified two decades ago, between what happens and how this is studied within the disciplined academic sphere of IR.29 By recognising the cultural and historical specificity of the regularised parameters of reference for IR theory and instead positing a metatheory from the disturbed remains of this naturalised social theory, it is hypothesised that the possibility is opened to dispel this academic anomaly and re-theorise political life from a premise of variant ontological roots that produce branches of epistemological thought

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to scatter seeds of hope for future sustainable life. If IR is to be reconstructed, it needs to be developed upon a contextualised metatheorisation of the agenda and its constituting agents.30 As a consequence it is hoped that it amounts to more than a ‘gesture politics’.31 Indeed, this explicitly normative concern for an inclusive politics does not diverge essentially off track from the impetus that initiated the discipline in the immediate post-First World War period, namely to create the conditions for peaceful relations upon earth.32

Notes 1 Enzensberger, H-M. (1974) ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, New Left Review, 84, 3–31, pp. 25–16. 2 Cf. Bourdieu, P. (Adamson, M., trans.) (1990) ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 3 Haraway, D. J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan__ MeetsOncoMouse_: Feminism and Technoscience, London: Routledge, p. 4. 4 Kirk, G. (1995) ‘Women Resist Ecological Destruction’, in Ashworth, G. (ed.) A Diplomacy of the Oppressed: New Directions in International Feminism, London: Zed Books, p. 73. 5 Starhawk (1990) ‘Power, Authority and Mystery: Ecofeminism and Earth-based Spirituality’, in Diamond, I. and Orenstein, G. F. (eds) (1990) Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 6 Cf. Wackernagel, M. and Rees, W. (illustrated by P. Testemale) (1996) Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers. 7 Walt, S. M. (1998) ‘International Relations: One World, Many Theories’, Foreign Policy (Special Edition: Frontiers of Knowledge) 110, 29–46. Only one author cited, Susan Strange, is non-American, despite his claim that non-American voices have become ‘more prominent’ (p. 35). 8 Walt, (1998) p. 43. 9 Pinkerton, J. P. (1997) ‘Enviroromanticism: The Poetry of Nature as Political Force’, Foreign Affairs, 76 (3), 2–7, pp. 4 and 7, respectively. 10 Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 11 Snyder, G. (1990) The Practice of the Wild, New York: North Point Press Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 7. 12 Waltz, K. N. (1979) Theory of International Politics, London: McGraw-Hill, Inc. 13 Maclean, J. (1981) ‘Political Theory, International Theory, and Problems of Ideology’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10 (2) 102–125. 14 Cf. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge, p. 153. 15 Cf. Plumwood, V. (1993a) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge. 16 Cf. Chambers, R. (1996) ‘Reversal for diversity – a new paradigm’, in Baumann, M., Bell, J., Koechlin, F. and Pimbert, M., for Worldwide Fund for Nature and Swissaid, The Life Industry: Biodiversity, People and Profits, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. 17 hooks, b. (1991) ‘Choosing the margin as a space of radical openess’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround. 18 Toulmin, S. (1982) The Return to Cosmology, Postmodern Science and The Theology of Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 261.


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19 Sylvester, C. (1994) Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 212. 20 Apffel-Marglin, F. (1996b) ‘Rationality, the Body, and the World: From Production to Regeneration’, in Apffel-Marglin, F. and Marglin, S. A. (eds) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 21 Sisson Runyan, A. (1992) ‘The “State” of Nature: A Garden Unfit for Women and Other Living Things’, in Peterson, V. S. (ed.) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations, Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, p. 137. 22 Haraway, (1989) p. 303. 23 Chan, S. (1998) ‘An ontologist strikes back: a further response to Hollis and Smith’, Review of International Studies, 24, 441–443, p. 441. 24 Chan, (1998) p. 443. 25 Bleiker, R. (1997) ‘Forget IR Theory’, Alternatives, 22, 57–85, p. 77. 26 Devetak, R. (1995) ‘The Project of Modernity and International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 24 (1), 27–51, p. 50. 27 Cf. Capra, F. (1996) The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, London: HarperCollins Publishers, p. 289. 28 See Harkness, J. (trans. and ed.) (1983) Michel Foucault: This Is Not a Pipe, with Illustrations and Letters by René Magritte, London: University of California Press, Ltd., for a discussion of the meanings of and spaces for critical exploration between visual and linguistic representations and the reality that they either resemble or to which they are similar. 29 Cf. Maclean, (1981). 30 Cf. Neufeld, M. (1994) ‘Who’s Afraid of Meta-Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 23 (2), 387–393. 31 Beck, U. (Weisz, A., trans.) (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 11 and 168. 32 Cf. Smith, S. (1992) ‘The Forty Years’ Detour: The Resurgence of Normative Theory in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 21 (3), 489–506.

Index

abortion 116 Accord 208 activism 37, 120: see also resistance Adams, Carol 144 agency 231 agriculture: alien practices 181, 182, 194, 210–11; animal economic role 141, 151; capital-intensive farming 186; commercialisation and technologisation of 109, 116, 189; ‘fire-stick farming’ 197; foreign aid programmes 210; Green Revolution 116, 181, 208, 210–11, 215–16; indigenous practices 184–5, 187–8, 197–9; intensive farming 169; livestock 142, 159, 161; market-led agriculture 124; monoculture 124, 181, 194, 195, 198; shifting cultivation 184–5, 190, 196; subsistence farming 188; women’s labour 4, 109, 116, 124 agro-forestry 211 Amazonia 180, 185, 190, 197, 200, 201, 215: see also Brazil, Kayapó, Krenak androcentrism 162, 231 animals: see nonhuman animals anthropocentrism 1, 2, 3, 24, 26, 46, 47, 48–9, 51, 139, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164: anthropocentric humanism 153; articulation of rights 149; criticisms of 139–40; human-centred perspective 48, 139; inconsistencies 140 anthropomorphisation 156, 231 anti-green movement 57 Apffel-Marglin, Fredérique 125, 129, 231 Aristotle 14–15, 18, 162: on the indivisibility of soul and body 15; on the state 14–15; on utilitarianism 146–7

assimilation 181 Athanasiou, Tom 56 atomism 10, 52, 110, 159–60, 160, 161, 202, 216 Australian Aborigines 197 autonomy 1, 4, 49, 147, 186 Bacon, Francis 5, 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 113, 114, 127, 147: Novum Organum 16; on domination of nature 2, 17, 21, 42 Baker, S. 166 Barthes, Roland 140 Beck, Ulrich 6, 41 Bentham, Jeremy 154 Bikas people of Nepal 186 biocentrism 47, 159, 160, 163 biological diversity 50, 52, 101, 126, 181, 199, 208 biospherical egalitarianism 45, 49, 160 biotechnology revolution 182, 194 biotic citizenship 59 biotic community 160, 162 biotic pyramid 44 Bleiker, Roland 25, 233 Blum, Deborah 167–8 Bookchin, Murray 55 Borneo 151, 196 Botswana: Central Kalahari Game Reserve 212–13 Bramwell, Anna 37, 165 Brazil 117, 180, 200, 211–12, 216: land distribution 212; Movement for the Landless (MST) 212; rubber tappers’ movement 123–4, 200, 215: see also Amazonia, Kayapó, Krenak, Mendes Buddhism 47–8 capitalism 37, 112, 195, 205, 206, 214 Carson, Rachel 37, 56: Silent Spring 56

238

Index

Cartesian dualism 7, 15–16, 19, 20, 29, 45, 105 Cartesian scientism 147–8 Cartesianism 1, 5, 21, 24, 41, 42, 127, 152, 153, 155, 165, 168, 228, 231 causality 40 China 105 Chipko movement 41, 123, 196, 205, 209 chivalry 105 citizenship 11, 181 civil society 15 Classical Greek philosophy 12: see also Aristotle; Plato cloning 168 Club of Rome 54 co-evolutionary social relationships 161 Coleridge, Stephen 154 Colombia 124 colonisation 37, 110, 125, 181, 182, 188, 193, 194–5, 203 Commission on Global Governance 186–7 communitarianism 45, 53, 117 community-based environmental projects 123 compartmentalism 40 Comte, Auguste 21 constructivism 51, 229 contraception 99, 103 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) 158 Coordinating Body for Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) 197 cosmological consciousness 40–1, 46, 86 cultural decolonization 202 cultural diversity 50, 52, 101, 177, 181, 199, 208 cultural impoverishment 42 culture–nature binary 6, 23, 108, 115, 139, 189, 201 Daly, Mary 119 dams 99, 181, 191, 207 Darwin, Charles 151, 169: The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals 153–4 de Beauvoir, Simone 112 decentralisation 49 deep ecology 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 58: ‘basic intuition’ 159; practice and philosophy of, tension between 51; principles 50

deforestation 123, 185 Descartes, René 12, 16, 21, 22, 147: on animals 147; Discourse on Method 16; on nature 113–14 desertification 56, 211 development discourse 2, 115, 116, 117, 121, 181, 184, 186, 188, 200, 209–10 development programmes 194 Devetak, Richard 28 Differential Imperative 57 discourse 78–9, 90: archaeological discourse 71–2, 79, 82, 83; constitution of 71–2, 78, 82; controlling forces 79; patriarchally constructed discourse 105, 107, 108; and power relations 78–9 Dyak people of Sarawak 196 Dyer, Hugh 25 Earth First! 47, 52 Eckersley, Robyn 25, 52, 163 ecocentrism 3, 26, 48, 49, 51, 52–3, 59, 139, 230 ecofeminism 100, 108, 118–22, 130: activist-based movement 120; monistic nature 122; plural and diverse epistemologies 120; psychobiologistic ecofeminism 119; subjectivity 125; subversive nature 119–20; theoretically inclusive 120; transformative power 120 ecological paradigm 38–43, 45, 84: articulating 40–3; politicising 43–5 ecological perspective 3, 23, 29–30, 36–59, 89–91, 230, 232–3: as paradigm 38–43; prioritising 2, 6, 7, 36; re-orienting values 45–8; weakness of ecological political theory 57 Ecological Relations 4, 7, 10, 25, 233: the case of indigenous peoples 177–226; the case of nonhuman animals 138–76; the case of women 97–137; conceptually open and diffuse 233; Foucauldian methodology 67–91; politicising and theorising 70; privileging the ecological 7 ecology: ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ ecology 49, 50, 51; etymological root 43; history of 36–8; metaphysical ecology 41; politicisation of 37; potential political power of 58; scientific ecology 41; social ecology 55; spiritual dimension 46–7

Index economics: dualistic divisions 108–9; energy economics 37; reductionist economics 115–16 ecosocialism 52 ecosophy 49–50, 160 ecosystem diversity 164 Ecuador 180 education, holistic 50 embeddedness, biological and social 38, 52, 53, 120, 160, 161 empiricism 40, 41 empiricist-positivist methodology 9 Enlightenment 20, 22, 36, 85, 147, 149 Enloe, Cynthia 114 environmental degradation 26, 109, 187, 188, 191, 194, 203 environmentalism 38, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58 environmental–ecological debate 53 enviroromanticism 229 Epicurean metaphysics 48 essentialism 16, 17, 42, 121–2, 128 ethics: Aristotelian view 14; of complementarity 55; ‘cultivation of the self’ 80; environmental ethics 167, 168; prelude to political praxis 86–8 Ethiopia 210 ethnicity 177 ethnocentrism 28 Eurocentrism 20, 179 factory farming 103, 141 Fano, Alix 145 female circumcision 104 female foeticide 105 feminarchy 118 femininity 98, 106 Ferry, Luc 164, 166 ‘fetishization’ of nature 55 foreign aid 203, 204 forestry 123, 181–2, 183–4, 190, 196, 198, 204–5 Foucault, Michel 3–4, 27, 28–9, 233: The Archaeology of Knowledge 68; The Birth of the Clinic 77; The Care of the Self 69, 80; critique of power relations 68, 70, 73–5, 86, 89, 229, 230; Discipline and Punish 68, 69, 76, 77; on discourse 71–2, 79, 82, 90; Foucauldian methodology 3–4, 67–70, 233; The History of Sexuality 69, 77, 80; on human nature 85–6;

239

open attitude towards politicisation 67–8; ‘The Order of Discourse’ 69, 79; The Order of Things 68, 69, 71; ‘The Subject and Power’ 69; The Use of Pleasure 69, 80 Fouts, Roger 157 Fox, Warwick 46, 139, 160 freedom 19, 20, 38, 55, 148 Freud, Sigmund 104 Gaia 41, 45, 47, 56 gate keeping 25 gender politics 98, 100, 106, 121, 177 genealogical perspective 70, 84, 231 genetic engineering 129, 168 genetic mapping of humanity 182, 195, 216 genital mutilation 104, 114 Ghandi, Mahatma 49 Gilligan, Carol 107 global equilibrium 55, 56 global warming 159 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 145 Green Belt Movement 123 green political theory 26, 55 Green Revolution 116, 181, 208, 210–11, 215–16 Griffiths, Susan 107–8 Haeckel, Ernst 37 Hanunoo people of the Philippines 198–9 Haraway, Donna 43, 111, 129, 142, 143, 166, 201–2 Hardin, Garret 54 Haught, John 47 Haustec Indians of Mexico 199 Havel, Valav 27 hierarchisation 2, 12, 47, 97, 110 Hinduism 48 Hobbes, Thomas 2, 16, 17–18, 19, 22, 149–50: Leviathan 18, 21 holism 1, 29, 40, 49, 167 hooks, bell 29, 107, 127 human chauvinism 57, 140 Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) 182, 195, 216 human supremacy, disputing 45, 160 human welfare ecology 52 human-centred epistemology 167 humanism 46, 139, 148, 149, 152, 155, 162–3, 164

240

Index

humanity 1, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 29, 43, 47, 55, 56, 86, 129, 162: essential animalism of 162; ethical responsibility 4, 49; relationship with nature 43–4, 45, 47, 117; resituating 45 human–nature dualism 41, 49 Hume, David 148, 152 hunting 141 identity 46, 162: cultural identity 202; denigration of natural associations 106; identity-in-difference 231; perversion of 195 imperialism 140, 164, 181, 195 India 116, 121, 124, 181, 184, 196, 198, 207–8: agriculture 116, 189, 208; Alakananda Valley 196; dam projects 99, 207, 213; Green Revolution 116, 210–11, 215–16; Karnataka 204–5; Kerala 191; KSK (Centre for Conservation of Traditional Farming Systems) 208; land reforms 191–2; Nagarhole National Park 192; Narmada Valley 207, 213; Orissa 125, 184; population control programmes 103, 105; rural women in 121, 124–5; tribal lands 184, 208: see also Ladakhis, Chipko movement indigenous peoples 5, 43, 177–226: adoption of foreign technology 201, 202; assimilation and ‘re-education’ 193; autonomy, asserting 206, 211; autonomy, usurpation of 186, 188, 192, 210; colonial exploitation 203; conceptualisation as a rare biological resource 216; contradictory activities of 209; cultural diversity 177, 196, 199; debt servicing and repayment 213; definition 177; depoliticisation 5, 91, 178, 179, 191; displacement 179–80, 188, 192, 194; distribution and numbers 177; farming practices 184–5, 187–8, 197–9; incorporation into global economy 213; infantalisation 180, 181, 206; interacting with global forums 6, 197, 217; knowledge 177, 193, 196, 198–200, 210, 211, 216; labour 187–9; land and identity concept 178; land rights 181, 192; naturalisation 3, 5, 179; objectification 5, 91, 178, 179–89, 202; as ‘other’ 5; outside appropriation of local consciousness

207–8; pauperisation 188; power conflicts 6, 203; resistance 5–6, 91, 196–7, 200–1, 203, 204–5, 209, 210, 214, 215, 216; self-determination 206; social division 188–9; subject status 195–206; world-views 43, 106, 178, 183, 196, 199, 208, 212, 214 individualism 80, 187 individualism–communitarianism dualism 117 Indonesia 180 induction 40 industrialisation 50, 51 infanticide 105, 116 intellectual property rights 195, 206 interconnectedness of the natural world 1, 3, 6, 29, 44, 45, 52, 53, 58, 68, 117, 146, 160, 229, 230 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 158 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 142, 213 International Relations (IR): academic discipline of 9, 10; conceptual scope 36; ‘difference-tolerant IR’ 231; dominant approaches within 11; ecological revisioning of 10, 27, 28, 89–91, 91, 232, 234; epistemological exclusivity 26–30; epistemological and methodological parameters and limitations 1, 6, 9, 10, 11–12, 24, 227; evolution 12–13; failure to address ecological concerns 26; foundational philosophical texts 3, 13–23; inbred cognitive closure of 13; insularity and self-referentiality 11; and international relations 9–10; marginalisation of feminine debate within 11; metaphysics of 11–12, 23, 24, 25, 217; political theory of 13–23, 140 invisibility of ecological issues 26 ‘irregular’ disciplines 71 Jainism 48 Judæo-Christianity 45, 47, 48, 146 justice: Plato on 14; social justice 148, 215 Kant, Immanuel 16, 19, 20, 22, 164–5: Critique of Pure Reason 20; ‘Duties Towards Animals and Spirits’ 148–9; on human autonomy 147 Kayapó Indians 197, 201, 202

Index Kenya 123 knowledge 22, 71, 75, 76–7, 101, 107: commercialisation of 216; democratisation of 209; denigration of alternative knowledges 193; ecological wisdom 125; indigenous 6, 177, 193, 196, 198–200, 210, 211, 216; political economy of 76; ‘popular knowledge’ 84–5; power–knowledge nexus 76–7, 78, 128, 129; socially constructed barriers to 3; subjugated knowledges 84–5; translation of foreign systems of 183; Western knowledge system 193 Koitor tribe 183 Krenak Indians 211–12 Kropotkin, Peter 55 labour 108–11: abstraction and objectification of 188; animal labour 144–5; free labour 109; gender division of 116; of indigenous peoples 187–9; ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ work 189; sexual labour 110; unequal burden 109, 112, 116; Western male criteria 109; women and the metaphoric double-bind 110; women’s labour 108–11, 116; see also agriculture Ladakhis 124, 178: see also Women’s Alliance of Ladakh land: and capital accumulation 44; collective land use 181, 189, 190–1; indigenous peoples’ attitudes to 196–8, 209; land ethic 167, 229–30; land reform programmes 191; respect for integrity of 196; subsistence forms of land use 187, 189 language: cultural specificity of 208; locus of struggle 107; minority languages 119; nonhuman animals 157–8; normalising social system 183; and objectification 105–8, 142–4, 182–3; and power relations 107; as social construction 107; translation of foreign systems of knowledge 183; women’s language 107 Leopold, Aldo 44, 59, 167, 229 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 140 liberalism 148, 161, 229 Limits to Growth, The 51 literacy programmes 103 Litfin, Karen 24 Lovelock, James 56

241

Maathai, Wangari 123 Machiavelli, Niccolò 114 Macy, Joanna 41 ‘male gaze’ 104, 105, 119, 128 male hegemony 104 malnutrition 110, 181 man-the-hunter myth 112 Maori language 119 marriage 102 Marsh, George 37 Marxism 25, 70 masculine–feminine binary 98, 108, 115 masculinity 98 master culture 98 Mathews, Freya 46 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 153 meat culture 142, 144, 159, 169: cultural taboos 144; naming meat 142, 143, 144 mechanistic world-view 18, 39, 40, 41, 112 medicine: discourse of 78; institutionalisation of 104, 114 Mendes, Chico 200, 215 Merchant, Carolyn 19, 112 metalanguage 23, 25, 28, 67, 70 metaphysics 1, 2, 11–12, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 86, 150–1 Midgley, Mary 152, 165 midwifery 113 Mies, Maria 117, 121 misanthropy 55, 139 modernity 11, 26, 28, 166 monocultures 38, 52, 124, 181, 194, 195, 198 monologist world-view 2 Monsanto 216 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 152 Montreal Protocol 24 moral economy 55 moral extensionism 156–7 moralism 149 Mother Goddess 118 Muir, John 47 multinational corporations 56, 180, 182, 202 Naess, Arne 49, 50, 160 naturalisation 3, 11, 20, 21–3, 27, 118, 233: methodology 21–3; of women 3, 4, 21, 42, 104, 108, 111, 113, 118, 127 naturalist literature 56

242

Index

nature: Aristotelian view 15, 18; Baconian view 21; Cartesian view 17, 20, 113–14; co-dependent and cooperative relationships within 45; cognitive distancing of 42; cultural conception 98; epistemological rationalisation 19; essentialist approach to 15, 16; feminisation of 14, 106, 108, 110, 118, 127–8; Greek understanding of 16; Hobbesian view 17–18; juxtapositioning with the state 26; Kant on 19, 20; legitimation of control and use of 17; nature–culture dualism 6, 23, 108, 115, 139, 189, 201; nature–politics dualism 17, 22; Newtonian view 20, 22; ‘otherness’ of 38, 42; pre-modern understandings of 12; problematic because unruly 16; relation of humanity to 21; Rousseau on 19; shift in philosophical concepts of 20–1; stewardship concept 45 neo-Darwinism 40 neo-imperialism 192 neo-Kantianism 43 neoliberalism 24 New Ageism 52 Newton, Sir Isaac 12, 19, 20, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 72, 87 Nigeria 198, 214–15 nomadism 191 non-anthropocentrism 139 nondiscriminatory compassion 48 nonhuman animals 5, 138–76: animal experimentation 143–5, 148–9, 154, 158, 161, 166–7, 168, 169, 182; animal liberation 52, 155; animal rights activism 168; Aristotelian view 146–7; awareness of 5; Cartesian view 147, 153; central economic role 141, 151; cultural marginalisation 151; domesticated animals 142, 159, 161; endangered status 158; exclusion from politicisation 91; existential dual roles 151; flow of knowledge between humans and 165; icon of the cultural construction of politics 170; metaphorical displacement 142; moral consideration of 148–9, 153, 155, 156–7, 163; natural continuum between humans and 140, 159; objectification 5, 91, 139, 141–52; perceiving 139; pre-modern times 151, 166; reductionist and utilitarian attitudes towards 168; rights

discourse 150, 153, 154, 155–6, 162, 163; sentimental view of 151; separation of humanity from animality 139, 148, 157; shared capacity for suffering 153, 154, 164; signification 166; species 158–9, 161; spiritual dimension 165; subject status 152–62, 166; subjugated ‘others’ 138, 150; totem relationships 151; zoophobic consideration of 151, 164 normalisation 77 North American Indians 43 objectification of history 85 objectification of indigenous peoples 5, 91, 178, 179–89, 202: dividing practices 189–95; labour 187–9; language 182–3; life 179–82 objectification of nonhuman animals 5, 91, 139, 141–52, 162: act of consumption 145–6, 169; dividing practices 145–52; labour 144–5; language 142–4; life 141–2 objectification of women 91, 101–11: cultural purification processes 114; dividing practices 112–18; emancipation from objectified status 118; as irrational and unruly bodies 113, 115; language 105–8; naturalisation 3, 4, 21, 112, 113, 118; reproductive role 102–5; sequestration of women’s humanity 114 objectivity 232 Ogoni people 214–15 OncoMouse 166, 168 organ transplants 168 organicism 41 Other(s)/otherness 5, 28, 87, 128: indigenous peoples as 5; nature as 38, 42; nonhuman animals as 138, 150; women as 104, 106, 127 Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man 154 Paktar, Medha 99, 200 passivism 40 Passmore, John 44–5, 149 pastoralism 146, 149 Paterson, Matthew 7 patriarchy 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 116, 118, 130: challenging 118–19; hegemony of development 116; hierarchisation 97; master–slave dialectic 120; meat eating as symbolic

Index patriarchal construction 142, 144; multidimensional dualisms of 108; naturalisation of women 126; political institutions 110–11 pharmaceutical industry 168 Plato 22: on the indivisibility of soul and body 15; Republic 13–14; tripartite classification of society 14 political community, constitution of 27 political philosophy 3, 78: classical historicization of 12; epistemological and metaphysical foundations 12, 13–21; ethnocentric and patriarchal foundations 12; legitimating praxis of 12–13; pre-modern understandings 12 political praxis 3, 7, 29, 39, 40, 48, 57, 67, 68, 73, 78, 84, 126, 129, 177, 230, 233: of ecofeminism 100; metaphysical foundation 86–8 political rationality 72–3, 79, 129, 138, 189 politicisation 10, 12, 21, 22, 25, 27, 164, 205, 228, 231, 232: of ecology 37; ethical responsibility 3; Foucault’s attitude to 67–8; metaphysical root 6; pluralistic 228 politics: conceptualising 138; economisation of 209; Foucault’s contribution to 88; gendered dualism 100; inclusive politics 1; nature–politics dualism 17, 22; separation from economics 108 pollution 49, 56–7 population control programmes 103, 105, 117 population growth 53, 54, 102 positivism 13, 21–2, 27, 138 postmodernism 11, 164 poststructuralism 11, 23, 53, 166, 233 poverty 185, 194, 211: and environmental degradation 194; politics of 185; women and 109, 110 power conflicts and relations 1, 6, 26, 27, 101: bio-power 76–7; and discourse 78–9; dispersal and usurpation 129; Foucauldian discourse 68, 70, 73–5, 86, 89, 229, 230; and gender relations 106, 126–7; imbalances 28; localised formations 74; locus and motivations of 90; manifold relations of 74; Marxist conceptions of 70; pastoral power 81; politicisation of power relations 129;

243

power–knowledge nexus 76–7, 78, 128, 129; reciprocal process 74; reconstituting power relations 228; and the silencing of language 107; societal dichotomisation 75; societal power 68; socio-culturally specific notion of 2; sovereign power 75; and the subject 80; symbiotic fluidity 74 Prakriti 121 PRATEC (Proyecto Andino de Technologias Campesinas) 208 preservationism 52 primates 139, 158, 157 privatisation 187 radical intellectuals 87 raison d’état 72 randomness 40 rape 104 rationality 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 36, 59, 104, 114, 149: Baconian rationality 5; Cartesian rationality 127, 129, 143, 151, 166, 169, 193; Enlightenment rationality 22, 36; scientific rationality 143; secular rationalism 146 realism 229 reason 14, 15, 19, 20, 22: see also rationality reductionism 22, 27, 39, 40, 41, 52, 110, 115–16, 149, 164, 168, 181, 198, 209, 230 Regan, Tom 155 relations 1, 68, 83–6: defining 68; ecological understanding of 10; expansive view of 6 relativism 122 religious pastoralism 146 renewable energy 50 reproduction and child rearing 42, 99, 102–5, 114, 115: ‘biologization’ of the woman 103–4, 113; birth rates 102; conflation of womanhood and motherhood 105; contraception and sterilisation 99, 103; cultural distancing of the father 102; location and equation of women with children 102; normalised as free labour 109; separation of sexuality and procreation 117; in Third World countries 102–3; women as ‘ecological markers’ 104–5 reproductive technologies 129

244

Index

resistance: brutal response to 212, 213; by indigenous peoples 5–6, 91, 196–7, 200–1, 203, 204–5, 209, 210, 214, 215, 216; by women 117–18 resources: conservation 52; consumption 49, 51, 54, 187; economisation of 216; overexploitation 116–17 reverence for life 48 right(s) 77–8: animal rights 150, 153, 154, 155–6, 162, 163; human rights 149, 155; land rights 181; sociopolitical rights 19 Rio ‘Earth Summit’ (1992) 126, 192: see also United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Rodman, John 38, 156 Rolston, H. 163–4, 168–9 Rorty, Richard 164 Rosenau, Pauline 25 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 16, 19, 20, 22, 38, 53: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality 153 Runyan, Anne Sisson 27 Sachs, Wolfgang 41 Sacred Grove 208 Sahel 191, 211 St Francis 37 Salt, Henry 154 Saurin, Julian 10, 26 Schumacher, E.F. 55 science 12, 16, 21, 22, 168 Scientific Revolution 112, 114 scientism 149 Seattle, Chief 169 Seed, John 41 self-awareness 48, 86 self-determination 130, 206 self-empowerment 118 self-objectification 127 self-realisation 46, 49, 160, 167 self-representation 111 self-restraint 53 self-sufficiency 55 sentimentalism 151, 155 Sessions, George 37 sexuality 77: and procreation, separation of 117 Shiva, Vandana 22, 104, 110, 111, 115, 121, 124–5 short-termism 227 Sierra Club 54–5 Sierra Leone 199

Singer, Peter 140, 154–5 Smith, Adam 109 social contract 19 social ecology 55 social forestry 205 social sciences 9, 21, 22, 44 society, Plato on 14 socio-political rights 19 Socrates 147 soul 15–16, 147, 148 sovereignty 21, 25, 67, 75, 78, 82, 121, 180: over resources 202; political sovereignty 19; state sovereignty 25, 180; of the subject 121 species 130, 158–9, 161 species preservation 156 speciesism 140, 155, 159, 177, 230 Spinoza, Baruch 148 spiritual awareness 40–1, 48 Spretnak, Charlene 48 state 19, 21, 25: Aristotelian view 14–15; Plato on 14; sovereignty 25, 180 sterilisation 103, 117 stewardship 45 Stoic philosophy 12, 22, 48, 146, 148, 152 subalternity 207, 215 subject 71, 72, 80–3, 90: ambiguity of subject status 86; animals 152–62, 166; defining oneself as 4; genealogical illumination of the 89; indigenous peoples 195–206; methodology for perceiving political subjects 4; ‘new’ subjects 4; objectified nature of 4, 89; the ‘plenary subject’ 97; poststructuralist decentring of 166; power relations embodied in 80, 89; power of the subject 126–30, 162–70, 206–17; production of the subject 80–3; women 118–26 Sylvester, Christine 10, 28, 231 symbiosis 49 systems theory 41 Taylor, Thomas 154 technology, cross-cultural transference 201 teleology 19, 20, 22, 71, 185 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 108 Thailand 180 Third World Network 200 Thoreau, Henry David 45–6

Index totemism 151 toxic waste 57 toxicology 145 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development 206: see also Rio ‘Earth Summit’ United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85) 116, 127 Ure-eu-wau-wau people 216 utilitarianism 2, 26, 36, 44, 47, 146–7, 168 values: locus of 45; re-orienting 45–8 vegetarianism 169 Walker, Rob 28 Walt, Stephen 229 water supplies 191 White, Lynn 47 Whitehead, Alfred North 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 49, 107 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 154 women 97–137: deconstruction of ‘women’ 99; depoliticisation 21, 91, 126; as the dichotomised Other 104, 106, 127; feminisation of 113; Foucauldian discussion of 100–1;

245

marginalisation 4, 114, 116, 122, 125; metaphorical association with ‘nature’ 106, 108; naturalisation 3, 4, 21, 42, 104, 108, 111, 113, 118, 127; objectification of 91, 101–11; Plato on 14; and poverty 109, 110; and power relationships 126–7; resistance 5, 91, 117–18, 122–4, 125; sociocultural contextualisation of 98; struggle for autonomy 5, 110; subject status 118–26; subordination 4; Third World women 115, 116, 121, 122, 125; violence against 99, 104, 118; ‘women-hating rituals’ 104; see also reproduction and child rearing Women in Development (WID) 116 Women’s Alliance of Ladakh 124 World Bank 103, 142, 188, 191, 213 World Commission on Environment and Development 177 World Conference on Human Rights 206 World Health Organization 103, 213 world-views: indigenous peoples 43, 106, 178, 183, 196, 199, 208, 212, 214; mechanistic world-view 18, 39, 40, 41, 112; monologist world-view 2; Newtonian 40

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