Not So On The Margins: Critiques of Western Environmentalism and Exploitation

Introduction:

        “The earth seemed unearthly.” In Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s narrator describes how “[w]e are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.”^[1] In other words, he didn’t recognize this new wilderness as his own world because it was not contained by buildings, roads, and all of the comforts of human civilization. Today, the earth seems just as unearthly, just for an opposing reason. The earth seems unearthly because it is slowly being destroyed by climate change, greed, deforestation, pollution--all of which are human effects--to such an extreme that we now begin to not identify nature as it once was, even within brief time periods. However, as easy as it is to say destruction is human nature, we must resist. Environmental distress can not and should not be simplified into a human versus earth antagonistic relationship. For one, we must remember that humans have coexisted with our planet for around 200,000 years, living off of and alongside the earth. This is not an innate, inevitable human nature problem, it is one of modern industrialization, capitalism, and inequity. Secondly, loosely blaming environmental detriment as an all human issue fails to recognize diversity within humans and their diverse relationships with sustainability and the earth. Claiming the annihilation of the earth is human nature disrespects the historical and current efforts of Indigenous peoples to protect our planet, often at the risk of their own lives.

The Hungry Tide: The Hypocrisy of Modern Sustainability Movements

Makah whaler named Wilson Parker, Washington 1915

Photographer: Curtis, Edward S.

Two Makah Indian whalers stand atop the carcass of a dead gray whale moments after helping tow it close to shore in the harbor at Neah Bay, Wash.

Photographer: Thompson, Elaine

“It’s who we are.” In her book Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions, Charlotte Coté writes about the long-standing tradition of whaling in Makah and Nuu-chul-nulth cultures.^[2] Central to their diet, society, and celebrations for generations, their extensive whaling culture has been dated from as far as 4,000 years ago. Additionally, the Makah tribe is the only United States nation to possess the right to whale in their treaty. In 1999, the Makah people accomplished their first successful whale hunt in over 70 years, recently having announced their intent to whale again after the Grey Whale finally left the endangered species list. The joy and impact of the hunt was felt worldwide; the Makah held a potlatch to celebrate with their community and beyond, “reporters noted that people from all over the world attended—people from as far north as Alaska and from as far south as Fiji; people of all ages and racial backgrounds.” However, not everyone was overjoyed with the Makah’s whaling endeavors; the potlatch drew hordes of indignant protestors, shouting and jeering under the guise of animal rights activism.

“Many people, Native and nonNative, supported what we planned to do and understood its cultural relevance. But there were also people who opposed the revival of the whale hunts because they did not understand how important this practice was to us.”

As we continue into the age of the Anthropocene, I want to be cautious of recreating the historical hypocrisies of belittling Indigenous peoples and Indigenous practices in the name of conservation. Ironically, it was not the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth people who drove the whales to extinction. As mentioned priorly, they had been whale-hunting for thousands of years without issue. Instead, the blame lies on excessive commercial whaling. In fact, even though the Makah have the right to whale in their treaty, they were among the top supporters for the ban on international whaling while the Grey Whale remained endangered. Modern sustainability practices are indebted to Indigenous cultures yet it is Indigenous people who are demonized for simply engaging in said cultures.

This tension between Western animal-rights activism and the Indigenous right to live is demonstrated within Piya and Kanai’s argument about the tiger killing in The Hungry Tide:

“Aren’t we a part of the horror as well? You and me and people like us?” “Isn’t that a horror too—that we can feel the suffering of an animal, but not of human beings?” Because it was people like you, who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs.” ^[3]

                  Kanai is challenging Piya’s gut reaction of disgust towards the villagers who attacked the tiger. Within this challenge, Amitav Ghosh is referencing Joseph Conrad’s horror, a horror I originally associated with the overexploitation of the world’s resources and just maybe a reflection on the dehumanization of the native Congolese people. However, Ghosh appears to be expanding upon the original Conradian horror by now centering indigenous peoples' lives as a central point of interest, rather than a mere afterthought. While the true meaning of “the horror” in Heart of Darkness is ambiguous, there is no ambiguity within this section of The Hungry Tide; Ghosh’s message is clear: Western animal-rights activism will never be ethical until its participants work alongside Native populations rather than at the expense of Native populations. 

The Word for World is Forest: Dreaming as a Alternative to Dominant Culture

“Sometimes a god comes... he brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them insider the dream with walls and pretenses.” ^[4]

I want to take with me on my journey to the Anthropocene a personal challenge of which narratives I am acknowledging and centering in my worldview. The Word for World is Forest, and specifically the Athshean’s ability to dream, is a reminder of the importance of not solely referencing multiple cultural viewpoints but understanding the beauty and resilience of each culture. As human (or yumen) consumers of literature and written works, we often use language as a means to interpret, organize, and make sense of the world around us. However, LeGuin’s dream-time offers us a different consideration of what shapes our understandings: cultural practices. In Athsean culture, dreaming serves as a time where visions materialize, informing cultural values and behavior whilst awake. In the Athshean society, dreaming is a gift, most importantly, a gift that Earth colonists do not wield. Varying talents, perspectives, and skills belong to individual cultures, however not all are appreciated or represented equally.

The Word for World is Forest may be set on a different planet but the parallelism to Western colonization is direct and, honestly, rather blunt. The quote “Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated.” (p. 21) summarizes the very historical tension of colonialism. Set within the context of the Vietnam war, the novel focuses on the severe consequences of imperialism on humans and the environment--not just on the colonized but the colonizers as well. This is demonstrated through the horrors inflicted by the Earthlings onto the native Athsean population and their planet, which by the end of the novel proves to be the ruin of the Earth peoples. In the end of the novel, Selver tells the main yumen antagonist  that “There were trees and people and now there are only the dreams of them. It seems to me a fitting place for you to live, since you must live. You might learn how to dream there, but more likely you will follow your madness through to its proper end, at last.” (p.181) The Terrans (the colonists from Earth) originally arrived at this new planet after burning Earth to ruins through deforestation and over-exploitation of resources. Not learning any lesson, the Terrans repeated history while starting the same destructive process anew in this other world, a world they do not belong to. Within this black and white, good and evil novel, if there is any race which is uncivilized, it is the Terran race. Even at the very end, Selver gifts Davidson with life rather than take his personal vengeance. One can’t help but think of our own present day Earth. While we have not yet discovered other planets to exploit (and if we had, I possess no doubts we would act as true Terrans) this level of exploitation is still absolutely occurring, just between countries and not worlds.

Finally, while I appreciate this novel as an effective piece of New Wave science fiction for questioning dominant power narratives, its bluntness does not come without consequences. With an obvious comparison to Western and non-Western cultures comes potential implicated truths about the nature of certain races and populations. For example, the stereotype that Native populations are innocent and docile, the magical caretakers of this land. While I advocate for listening to Indigenous climate activists, I want to clearly differentiate between the appreciation and the romanticization of non-Western populations.

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch ^[5]

Around a quarter of a million people live in or near the Dandora landfill site and 6,000 people work within its grounds everyday. A quarter of a million people is 3 times as large as my hometown. I didn’t know this information before watching this documentary and that is a problem in itself. Western citizens are able to continuously exploit the world’s resources and create unbridled amounts of waste because they are able to exploit the inequitable power dynamic with non-Western peoples. After doing more research, I discovered, unsurprisingly, that the people who live on this dumping site experience frequent illness, depression, and often need to forage for food among the garbage. This image is a horrifying visualization of how the most wasteful burden the least wasteful.

 Unruly Edges: The Overlaps of Human Centrism and Eurocentrisim

“Domestication is ordinarily understood as human control over other species. That such relations might also change humans is generally ignored.12 Moreover, domestication tends to be imagined as a hard line: You are either in the human fold or you are out in the wild. Because this dichotomisation stems from an ideological commitment to human mastery, it supports the most outrageous fantasies of domestic control, on the one hand, and wild species self-making, on the other...Yet despite these extreme efforts, most species on both sides of the line—including humans—live in complex relations of dependency and interdependence.”

“The grains selected through domestication had big, high-carbohydrate seeds; high carbohydrate diets allowed women to have more children. Instead of working to limit fertility, as most foragers do, people suddenly wanted as many children as possible—not only because of the fetish of fertility but also because the family needed more labour for the cereals. The cereals did not care whether family or non-family labour raised them, and there was no dearth of people; but state-supported property encouraged labour inside the family, i.e., children. Having lots of children was not just nature at work; not all animals work to maximise reproduction. Out-of-control and non-sustainable human reproduction is a feature of a particular human domestication: the love affair between people and cereal grains. This obsession with reproduction in turn limited women’s mobility and opportunities outside of childcare. For all its matriarchal possibilities, it seems fair to call this interspecies love affair, echoing Frederick Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.”

“Plantations were the engine of European expansion. Plantations produced the wealth— and the modus operandi—that allowed Europeans to take over the world. We usually hear about superior technologies and resources; but it was the plantation system that made navies, science, and eventually industrialisation possible. Plantations are ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion. Plantations deepen domestication, reintensifying plant dependencies and forcing fertility. Borrowing from state-endorsed cereal agriculture, they invest everything in the superabundance of a single crop. But one ingredient is missing: They remove the love. Instead of the romance connecting people, plants, and places, European planters introduced cultivation through coercion... Because plantations have shaped how contemporary agribusiness is organised, we tend to think of such arrangements as the only way to grow crops. But this arrangement had to be naturalised until we learned to take the alienation of people from their crops for granted.”

-Anna Tsing ^[6]

        I selected these three passages because they informed me the most about the human condition (more specifically, the European condition) as narrated by the Earth. All of these quotes emphasize different impacts of our modern day relationship with food: human centrism, sexism, and racism. None of these ideas are mutually exclusive! In this essay, the conditions that facilitate sexism and racism derive from an imbalance between the Earth and humans, particularly, an imbalance in how we obtain sustenance and an imbalance between the wants of the few and the needs of many. Until recently, I fell within the group of people Tsing is critiquing with the line: “Domestication is ordinarily understood as human control over other species.” Until recently, until this course, until Tsing, I’ve internalized the concept that plants primarily function in our society as a means of nutrition and food. While, to me, the Earth does not seem unearthly when unbridled in its existence apart from human control, I still have naturalized the dichotomy she describes: the dichotomy between humanness and wilderness. I’ve never fully considered that plant domestication may dominate humans rather than humans dominating agriculture. More specifically, I’ve never questioned that cultivation is not natural. Our crops, that we rely so heavily on, do not automatically ease our hunger but function to maintain systemic power differences, and the proletariat class. It is foraging that has allowed humans to coexist with the planet for generation after generation, and it is foraging that offers us hope for sustainable and equitable food sovereignty.

Lasting Thoughts: Statements from Indigenous Leaders

“The non-indigenous do whatever they want and then put the blame on the Indian,”^[7]

 -Saulo Katitaurlu, a leader in the municipality of Conquista D’Oeste 

         Katitaurlu explained that when his group reported a fire to authorities, a rancher said the tribe had set the blaze themselves.

“At camp, the smell of campfire brought us back to another world--an older world, an Indigenous world always thought to be the on the brink of extinction, a place at once familiar to Native people and radically unfamiliar to settlers. In the twilight hours, Water Protectors told stories and shared the prophetic visions of a better world, not just in the past, but one currently in the making, as purple-grey smoke filled the spaces between tipis, tents, and lines of cars and trucks.”^[8]

-Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“I think we should be very happy and proud that we are still Indian people. We’re still alive, and we’re still resisting. We still have respect for the earth. We have traditional knowledge and values that are superior to anything in Western, “scientific,” industrialized culture. Yet industrial society neither understands nor wants our knowledge and our values.”^[9]

-Jace Weaver, Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice