By Caroline Hambloch, Mark Vicol and Helena Pérez Niño
Posted on Contemporary debates in agrarian studies have been predominantly focused on land and property issues, at times to the detriment of questions about production and exchange. The large and expanding footprint ...
By Aurélia Chevreul-Gaud and Sylvia I. Bergh
Posted on In a recent BLISS blog, we argued that outdoor nature education programmes in primary schools can help combat eco-anxiety among children. As young people have fewer and fewer direct encounters ...
By Luciana dos Santos Duarte
Posted on 
Projects introduced in the Amazon rainforest to ‘protect’ it from harm hardly ever follow this objective; instead, they represent human interests while negating the interests of non-humans. But the rainforest as non-human also deserves the right to be represented. Luciana dos Santos Duarte in this article draws on developments in three academic fields to show how non-humans can become recognized in such projects.
Known as the Green Hell , the western part of the Amazon rainforest stretching across Brazil has been a stage for many projects that claim to save the world in the name of ‘sustainable development’. These projects are often conceived using the problematic paradigms of ‘new’ and ‘modern’ (for example introducing ‘new ways to…’), and other buzzwords like ‘Forest 4.0’, where technology is always the presumed answer to sustainable development issues because it ensures the making of profits while saving the forest.
Although we are living in the Anthropocene[1], slowly pushing the button of self-destruction, entrepreneurs motivated to ‘save the world’ are not an endangered species. They create projects connecting a company (buyer), an NGO (to provide technical assistance and credibility in the forest), some cooperatives (workforce of rural farmers), multilateral banks (investors), and the Brazilian government (subsidies). All these actors (called stakeholders) are humans, as are their creations (e.g. corporations). They constitute culture and are Culture.
Dichotomous thinking
But what about the Amazon rainforest? The forest, or the ‘stage’ that these actors occupy, is seen as ‘just Nature’, assumed to be separate from ‘Culture’ – something we can literally step on, extract, and reshape based on our will. These binaries – culture/nature, human/non-human – feed the paradigms mentioned above, allowing them to permanently exist in the forest and enabling them to come and go. Like waves, the projects go to the Amazon in accordance with anticipated opportunities for profit. Then, they go away. They incorporate ‘new’ ideas, but do not maintain previous ideas.
There is a key difference between humans and non-humans according to French anthropologist Philippe Descola (author of Beyond Nature and Culture, 2005), “Humans are subjects who have rights on account of their condition as men, while nonhumans are natural or artificial objects that do not have rights in their own right”. Therefore, exercising authority over a certain domain of affairs is considered exclusively human. We humans think from the top down, representing our Culture, and are not so diplomatic with Nature.
Diplomacy for non-humans
As part of Culture – because it is a human invention – diplomacy mediates between different interests, traditionally benefiting humans, but not non-humans[2]. However, the complexity of this mediation between the interests of hundreds of cultures and nations around the world, which we can see on daily news (wars, terrorism, etc.) becomes overshadowed by the need to mediate between human interference in nature and the right of existence of the thousands of animal and plant species (to highlight just two categories of non-humans) that are dying due to deforestation, pollution, etc.. Due to humans, non-humans are disappearing.
The lack of representation of Nature in ‘sustainable development’ projects leads to the core question: How can we think about diplomacy for non-humans in Nature?
My positionality allows me to answer this question not as a diplomat, but as a product designer pursuing a double-degree PhD in Production Engineering and Development Studies, inspired by the outputs of my research in the Amazon. In saying that, and recalling a famous quote on creativity by Albert Einstein, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, I offer three different paths that could possibly inspire a more concrete answer to diplomacy for non-humans: Law, Anthropology, and Industrial Design.
The right to representation
In 1972, Christopher D. Stone wrote the breakthrough article; “Should trees have standing?”, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. He based his argument on the reasons why nature should be represented in court, for instance remembering that children in the past were seen as objects without rights or just an extension of their parents until their rights became recognized. Also, if non-humans like corporations can be represented by lawyers, why not trees and rivers?
Indeed, half a century after this seminal article was published, Whanganui River in New Zealand became the first river in the world to finally be represented in court [4]. The Maori people had been fighting for over 160 years to get it recognized as a legal entity. The river’s interest is now represented by one member from the Maori tribe and one from the government.
Regarding the field of anthropology, some scholars have been placing non-humans at the same epistemological level as humans, for instance, making science from what is the form of life of indigenous peoples, creating ideas like pluriverse[6]. However, our indigenous brothers and sisters do not know that their thinking-feeling can be framed in such fragmented terms. They do not see or live the Nature/Culture division. They are Nature.
Likewise, we as humans can be Nature, too, in our rational thinking and our creation of science and projects. As a lecturer in the field of Design, I am teaching my students to represent the voices of non-humans in their designs and to consider their positionalities in the design process. I believe that the agency of a lawyer should start at the embryonic stage of a project, amplifying the agency of the designer. In other words, the designer can represent Nature and non-humans through design inasmuch as they can do this for humans, mediating between the two as diplomats do. We become Nature by allying with Nature in our human activities.
The way forward
Once a project is in the Amazon, where we find thousands of non-human species (animals, plants, spirits), there is a lot of work to do – for anyone who can recreate their agency and their positionalities in projects, either for an entrepreneur, a scientist, a policy maker, or a designer – before we can go to court or march on to the apocalypse.
References
DESCOLA, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 488.
ESCOBAR, Arturo. Sustainability: Design for the Pluriverse. Development, 2011, 54(2), pp. 137-140.
LATOUR, Bruno. Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene. In Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil & François Gemenne (editors). The Anthropocene and the Global Environment Crisis – Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London, Routledge, 2015, pp.145-155.
HARAWAY, Donna. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantatiocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165.
HUTCHISON, Abigail. The Whanganui River as Legal Person. Alternative Law Journal, vol 39, 3 2014, pp. 179-182.
ROBINSON, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. London: Orbit, 2020, p. 576.
STONE, Christopher D. Should Trees Have Standing?–Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Southern California Law Review 45, 1972, pp. 450-501.
STONE, Christopher D. Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 264.
VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Aivinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 428.
WALSH, Catherine. Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (De)colonial Entanglements. Development, 53(1), 2010, pp. 15-21.
[1] The Anthropocene is a concept proposed as a geological epoch to mark the impact of humans on Earth, like changing the climate and causing irreversible damage. According to Latour (2015, p. 2), the Anthropocene is “the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization. […] Like the concept of Gaia, the risk of using such an unstable notion is worth taking. […] The use of this hybrid term made up of geology, philosophy, theology and social science is a wakeup call. What I want to do is to probe here in what sort of time and in what sort of space we do find ourselves when we accept the idea of living in the Anthropocene.”
[2] The recent launched science fiction, or climate fiction, book ‘The Ministry for the Future’ (ROBINSON, 2020) provides some insights in breaking this tradition. In the plot, a body stablished in the Paris Agreement acts as an advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation’s – humans considering their own non-humans.
[3] The status of legal personhood has been broadened in the course of history. For instance, slaves were once treated as property; however, with the abolition of slavery – a process, not a single event, in many countries – slaves were no longer regarded as property but as legal persons (HUTCHISON, 2014). Likewise, the status of legal personhood for nature – Stone’s idea – has been impacting courts, the academe, and society, which can be read in his book launched almost fifty years after the original article (STONE, 2010).
[4] In practical terms, it means the river can be represented at legal proceedings with two lawyers protecting its interests – one from the Maori, the other from the government. The Maori also received a NZD 80 million (USD 56 million) settlement from the government after their marathon legal battle, as well as NZD 30 million to improve the river’s health.
[5] Viveiros de Castro (1992) had proposed the term ‘perspectivism’ for a mode that could not possibly hold inside the narrow structures of nature versus culture. By studying indigenous people in Brazil and their shamanic practices, he saw that “human culture is what binds all beings together – animals and plants included – whereas they are divided by their different natures, that is, their bodies” (Latour, 2009, p. 1).
[6] According to Escobar (2011, p. 139) “the modern ontology presumes the existence of One World – a universe. This assumption is undermined by discussions in transition discourses, like the buen vivir” (in Spanish, or suma qamaña, a concept from the indigenous people Aymara, in South America), and the rights of Nature. For Walsh (2010, p. 18), the concept of buen vivir “denotes, organizes, and constructs a system of knowledge and living based on the communion of humans and nature and on the spatial-temporal-harmonious totality of existence”. Coming back to Escobar (idem), “in emphasizing the profound relationality of all life, these newer tendencies show that there are indeed relational worldviews or ontologies for which the world is always multiple – a pluriverse”.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author:
Luciana dos Santos Duarte is doing a double-degree PhD in Production Engineering (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Development Studies (International Institute of Social Studies). She holds a master’s degree in Production Engineering, and a Bachelor degree in Product Design. She is a lecturer in Industrial Design Engineering at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Part of her research is shared on her website ethicalfashionbrazil.com
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As The Netherlands is currently suffering from extreme heat, it is worth reminding ourselves of the effects of the latest heatwave, which took place from 10-16 August, 2020. Worryingly, the ...
By Fergus Simpson and Sara Geenen
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By Maryse Helbert
Posted on 
Forty years after the ‘clean up’ of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill, the shores of Brittany that have been forever blighted by the spill attest to our collective failure to manage the consequences of our addiction to oil. Clean-ups or compensation are not enough to address the permanent damage caused, writes Maryse Helbert—we need to find other ways to fix the zones that have been sacrificed during decades of oil exploitation.
Over recent decades, civil society actors in many countries running on oil, so to speak, have pushed oil companies to halt their activities and clean up the mess they’ve made. In Peru, Ecuador, and Nigeria, indigenous communities have engaged or sued oil companies to try to force them to either clean up oil spills or to provide compensation for the damage to their territory. Long-term lessons learned from the cleaning up the 1978 oil spill in Brittany, France can help us anticipate the challenges that lie ahead as the number of incidents increase. As this oil spill that took place over 40 years ago shows, it is next to impossible to return an environment destroyed by oil to its original state. Alternatives, then, should be found to compensate communities that have been affected by our oil addiction, and the long-term rehabilitation of the affected areas should be a top priority.
It has been estimated that, over the last five decades, approximately 9 to 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled in the Niger Delta region in Nigeria. For the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon alone, between 2011 and 2014, the equivalent of around seven million barrels of crude oil was spilled in 464 events. And in a report by Oxfam and Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos published last year, it was estimated that 474 oil spills had occurred between 2019 and 2020 along the Norperuano pipeline in Peru. It has also been estimated that over the course of eight years, between 1972 and 2017, around three billion barrels of toxic waste associated with oil production were leaked into the Amazon in northern Peru.
Impacted oil communities worldwide have sought compensation for the damage caused to their environment by oil extraction and transport processes and to force the cleaning up of spills. In 2012, in the Niger Delta, the Bodo community filed a lawsuit against Shell in a London high court. Following this lawsuit, in 2015 Shell agreed to a £55 million settlement to compensate the community for the harm incurred. Similarly, in 2008, three Nigerian villages sued Shell as a Dutch company in a Dutch court of law, while in 2014 the Peruvian government was forced by a Peruvian court to respond to the oil spill health crisis. And in Ecuador, early last year indigenous people living along the Ecuador’s northern Amazon pipeline launched a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government and private and state oil companies operating in the area to provide compensation. This increase in lawsuits filed by indigenous communities against large companies that extract oil in countries in the Global South is a welcome first step. Yet compensation is too little, too late. Once the damage has been done, it is irreversible.
Walking along the northern coasts of Brittany reminds me of the impossibility of ever fully cleaning up oil spills. A story is told in my family of my uncle and aunt opening the shutters of their house at Portsall in Brittany early in the morning of the 17 March 1978 when the smell of oil hit them, immediately telling them that what they had feared for decades had finally happened. The Amoco Cadiz, on its way to Rotterdam, had run aground the previous day. In the following days, it spilled 223,000 litres of light crude oil and an additional 4,000 litres of bunker oil on a stretch of coastline of more than 300 kilometres. To this date it is the fifth-largest oil tanker accident in history. And the worst of all is that the tragedy could have been avoided: during its construction, it was known that the tanker had a leak that needed to be fixed, but the repair was postponed several times as delivering oil was prioritized and costs cut. The storm on the English Channel on the 16 March 1978 got the better of it, and environmental destruction ensued.
In the days following the spill, coastal communities themselves began the arduous process of cleaning up, scraping up the ‘chocolate mousse’ that the emulsification of oil and water was forming on the beaches. The scale of the disaster required the army to be recruited to help the local population clean up, and 300 students volunteered to collect the dead birds, which numbered in their thousands.
Fourteen years after the spill, in 1992, a US court ordered Amoco and Shell, who were responsible for the spill, to pay US$200 million in damages to the French government. The damages covered some of the economic costs of the clean-up, but the court denied claims for compensation for ecological destruction and losses. It has been estimated that these damages covered only 19% of the total environmental and economic costs of the oil spill. Half of the money simply helped pay for the trial in the US. The damage was far worse than anticipated, and the compensation helped get the oil off the tip of the iceberg, leaving the rest of it submerged.
Walking along these beaches since the spill occurred many years ago shows that the word ‘clean-up’ is a misnomer. In the first decades, it was impossible to go even a short distance on the beaches without coming across balls of oil in the sand and patches of oil slicking the rocks or a layer of oily residue thirty centimetres deep in the sand along the whole length of the beach. Nowadays, these obvious signs of the spills have only partly disappeared. The spill has had long-term consequences. It resulted in the largest loss of marine life ever recorded. Even today, sea life has still not entirely recovered from the long-term consequences of the toxicity of the oil, but also from products such as dissolvents that were used to disperse and sink the oil during the cleaning process. Sightings of oil have also not disappeared. On the more remote islands, there are still layers of oil residue under the sand and oil still slicks the rocks and pebbles on some beaches. The oil can be traced back to the Amoco Cadiz by DNA testing.
The most controversial topic though is the fate of the ‘chocolate mousse’. In the initial rush to clean up the oil slick, the oil recovered was buried in landfills, particularly in dunes along the coast. Forty years later and with erosion due to climate change, there is a fear that oil could again leak from these sites into the coastal environment. This secondary oil spill could be equally devastating.
The Amoco Cadiz spill gives us a small-scale snapshot of the titanic challenges of cleaning up oil spills. But the spill in Brittany is dwarfed by the scale of oil pollution in the Niger Delta, Ecuador, Peru and many other oil extraction sites. Every year since oil extraction began in the Niger Delta, an average of four times more oil than the Brittany oil spill has been spilled from terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms in the area. The scale of oil spills is thus only increasing, and companies are still not taking responsibility.
While clean-up initiatives are absolutely needed, they fall short in meeting the challenges of repairing the damage caused. Forty years after the ‘clean up’ of the Amoco Cadiz oil spill, the shores of Brittany attest to our collective failure to manage the consequences of our addiction to oil: they remain polluted and may be considered permanently damaged. There is arguably a lack of capacity, whether financial or technological, to fully restore polluted sites. We need to find other ways to fix the zones that have been sacrificed during decades of oil exploitation, and financial compensation is just the start.
About the author:
Maryse Helbert is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the ISS. Prior to that, she was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. She has been an advocate for women’s rights for decades, having worked for AWID (Association for Women in Development), DIPD (Danish Institute for Parties and Democracies), and she is a gender-based violence research expert to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals for the United Nations Development Programme. Taking an ecofeminist approach, her PhD looked at oil industry and its economic, social and environmental impacts on women in three countries. In her latest work, she takes on the lessons learnt from the fossil fuels industry to explore the challenges of a post-carbon society.
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Posted on Lize Swartz in conversation with Dr Gustavo García-López, 2019-2021 Prince Claus Chair Social and environmental injustice are increasing globally as neoliberalism tightens its grip. Crisis upon crisis are hitting especially vulnerable ...
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Posted on Road construction is usually presented as a major condition for development, but the question is: development for who and whose land is being intruded for the construction of the road? ...
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Posted on The global ‘fisheries crisis’—in which fish stocks are depleted, environmental destruction has reached an apex, and small-scale fisheries are disappearing—is causing irreversible damage to both the fisheries sector and communities sustained by fishing activities. Governments implement stricter regulations and resource management strategies in an attempt to solve the crisis, but these approaches typically leave out the perspectives of small-scale fishers. Despite this, fishing communities are constructing innovative ways to make their voices heard and to protect their lives and livelihoods.
Transforming global fisheries
The overlap of the global food crisis (sparked by the 2007-2008 food price spike), and rapid economic growth occurring in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has contributed to significantly altering patterns of food production, consumption and trade worldwide. Economic growth has also facilitated changing dietary preferences, contributing to a rising global demand for animal protein. Fish protein has become particularly popular in light of health warnings about industrially farmed animals and eating too much red meat. This has caused fish consumption to double worldwide in the last 50 years.
Rising consumption has intensified pressure on the global fisheries sector—particularly to meet the demands of highly populated countries like China. Even South Africa, which has the smallest economy and population among the BRICS, saw fish consumption increase by 26% between 1999 and 2012. In terms of production, China is by far the world leader, and at its 2012 peak contributed 70% of fish to the global supply. Between 2012 and 2014, it further expanded its capture fishing sector by almost 2 million tonnes and its aquaculture sector by nearly 5 million tonnes. India produced at a similar level, contributing 50% of the global fish supply in 2012—ranking third in global capture fisheries (after China and Peru) and second in aquaculture. South Africa has one of the largest capture fishing sectors in the African continent, contributing approximately US$ 435 million to the national economy in 2012.
Fighting for policy change in South Africa
Capture fishing in South Africa is an important source of livelihoods for many coastal communities, of which a large proportion engages in small-scale fishing. Of the 43,458 commercial fishers and 29,233 subsistence fishers in South Africa, approximately 50,000 are considered small-scale.[i] However, despite comprising almost 62% of the fishing population, the South African Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’ national policies have historically not recognised the particular needs of small-scale fishers and the difficulties they are facing, focusing instead on expanding the large-scale industrial fishing industry. This has sparked intense resistance from fishing communities.
After the government adopted its 2005 long-term fisheries policy, leaving small-scale fishers without any access or fishing rights, a group of fishing communities, led by community organisations Masifundise and Coastal Links, took the issue to the South African Equality Court. The Court finally ruled in favour of the development of a new policy. In 2012, the new Policy for the Small-Scale Fisheries Sector in South Africa was completed, introducing new strategies for managing the sector, which aim to secure rights and access for communities by prioritising human rights, gender, and development as key issues. This marked an important victory for South African fishers, demonstrating their capacity for mobilisation and to achieve change. In 2014, Masifundise and Coastal Links also published Small-scale Fisheries Policy: A Handbook for Fishing Communities, providing fishers with accessible information on how the policy could be applied in their daily lives.
Fishers’ participation in governance processes
Considering South Africa’s 2012 policy was developed partly as a response to pressure from fishing communities, it has set an important precedent for future fisheries policies, both nationally and internationally. Masifundise and Coastal Links also played key roles in discussions with the FAO’s Committee on Fisheries (COFI), which led to the publication of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) in 2015. These guidelines were the result of a bottom-up participatory process that included 4,000 representatives from small-scale fishing communities, governments, fish workers’ organisations, research institutes, and NGOs.
The development of the SSF Guidelines and South Africa’s national policy signal an important shift in the perception and governance of fisheries sectors. While small-scale fishers have been crucial contributors to the global food system for generations, their rights are only now beginning to be more formally recognised. There appears to be an important connection between this newfound recognition and increasing mobilisation within fishing communities both nationally and around the world.
The rise of a global ‘fisheries justice’ movement?
Increasing mobilisation among fishers, particularly within the last few decades, has demonstrated their commitment to participating in, and shaping, the transformation of the fisheries sector and its socio-political context. Fishers are also joining forces with farmers, pastoralists, rural, and indigenous peoples, as overlapping food and climate crises highlight common struggles between social movements. Their shared commitment to creating a fair food system has contributed both to a transnational convergence of resource justice movements (e.g. agrarian, climate, environmental), as well as the emergence of what I would argue is a global ‘fisheries justice’ movement.
A key actor in this movement is the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), of which Masifundise and Coastal Links are active members. Founded in 1997, the WFFP now links 43 national small-scale fishers’ organisations in 40 countries around the world. It focuses on addressing the issues threatening small-scale fisheries (e.g. privatisation, climate change) and advocates for fishers’ human rights and secure livelihoods. The WFFP holds a triennial General Assembly and an annual Coordinating Committee meeting for member organisations to come together, reflect on their goals and actions taken, and develop new strategies for the future.
In an era when power within the food system is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a few huge corporations, movements of small-scale food producers and their allies offer alternatives based on social justice, sustainable production methods, and protecting the environment that rejuvenate hope for the way forward.
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Posted on Anti-globalists and some environmentalists argue that globalisation is harmful to the environment because it leads to an increase in the global demand for and supply of goods and increased energy ...
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