#ecocentre

[kazimirkharza]

People who think that replacing a wild ecosystem (left pic) with a solar plant (right pic) is "good for the environment" are seriously delusional. Solar panels require a global supply chain, (fossil fuel-based) mining and refining of rare-earth minerals, denuding of areas, and regular washing, all of which are extremely ecologically destructive. They also have a relatively short life and become problematic toxic waste afterwards. Humans have existed sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the advent of civilization and thrived - believe it or not - without any of these 'green' energy technologies. If we wish to survive and thrive again we must return to those ways.

[youareatree]

And the essential step toward silencing nonhuman voices was imagining that only humans were capable of telling stories ... what is at stake is not so much storytelling itself but, rather, who can make meaning, and that we’ve put the ability to make meaning purely within the human realm.

- Vaughan Lee, E. (2022) Beings Seen and Unseen: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh, Emergence Magazine.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of the Rights of Nature

The philosophy of the rights of nature represents a paradigm shift in how we view and interact with the natural world. Traditionally, nature has been seen as a resource for human use, but this perspective advocates for recognizing the intrinsic value and legal rights of natural entities. This philosophy challenges anthropocentric worldviews and seeks to establish a more harmonious relationship between humans and the environment by recognizing the rights of ecosystems, species, and natural processes.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of the Rights of Nature

Intrinsic Value of Nature:

Central to this philosophy is the idea that nature has value beyond its utility to humans. Natural entities have their own right to exist, thrive, and evolve.

This perspective emphasizes the moral duty to respect and protect nature for its own sake.

Legal Personhood for Nature:

One of the most revolutionary aspects of this philosophy is the proposal to grant legal personhood to natural entities such as rivers, forests, and ecosystems.

Legal personhood would allow nature to have rights that can be defended in court, similar to corporations or individuals.

Interconnectedness of Life:

This philosophy highlights the interconnectedness of all life forms. Human well-being is deeply linked to the health of the natural environment.

By protecting the rights of nature, we also ensure the long-term sustainability and health of human communities.

Ecocentrism vs. Anthropocentrism:

The rights of nature philosophy advocates for an ecocentric approach, which places ecological well-being at the center of decision-making.

This contrasts with anthropocentric approaches that prioritize human interests over ecological health.

Ethical Responsibility:

This philosophy asserts that humans have an ethical responsibility to protect and preserve nature.

It calls for a shift from exploitation and domination to stewardship and respect.

Indigenous Perspectives:

Many Indigenous cultures have long recognized the rights of nature and the deep connection between humans and the environment.

The philosophy of the rights of nature often draws on these Indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems.

Environmental Justice:

The rights of nature philosophy is closely linked to environmental justice, which seeks to address the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on marginalized communities.

Recognizing the rights of nature can help ensure that environmental protections are applied equitably and justly.

Global Movement:

The movement for the rights of nature is gaining traction worldwide, with several countries and localities recognizing legal rights for natural entities.

Notable examples include Ecuador, which enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution, and New Zealand, which granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River.

Challenges and Criticisms:

Critics of the rights of nature argue that granting legal rights to nature could lead to legal and practical complications.

There are also debates about how to balance the rights of nature with human development needs.

Future Implications:

Recognizing the rights of nature has profound implications for law, governance, and ethics.

It could lead to new forms of environmental governance that prioritize ecological sustainability and the well-being of all life forms.

The philosophy of the rights of nature represents a transformative approach to our relationship with the environment. By recognizing the intrinsic value and legal rights of natural entities, this philosophy seeks to create a more just, sustainable, and respectful coexistence between humans and the natural world. It challenges us to rethink our ethical responsibilities and to develop legal frameworks that honor and protect the rights of nature.

[absentmoon]

the fact that no is winning is so ridiculous to me none of you have tried to dig into the og Frankenstein or Dorian Gray i swe

[caveundertree]

Word

You are alive

Therefore, you are a part of nature

To separate from nature is to die

Anti-Tech Introductory Reading List

Industrial Society and Its Future

Technological Slavery

Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

The Technological Society

Walden

The Hermeneutics of Ecological Limitation

We live in a highly technologized world that is hostile to human well-being. Every technological advance comes at a sharp cost to human freedom and the natural world.

[Start with ISAIF (a very brief and worthwhile read), then move on to Technological Slavery. If you are interested in further anti-tech writings—or want to get involved—check out Wilderness Front.]

[reunionandthen]

ok but what if violent revolution didn't involve slaying the dragon specifically. can't get shit in this house

[uclpact]

For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted: Ecocentric Practices for Land Restoration

Co-Directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) Maja and Reuben Fowkes will be presenting ‘For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted: Ecocentric Practices for Land Restoration’ on April 12th as part of the ‘Matter Matters: The Aesthetics and Politics of Soil’ panel at the 49th Annual Association for Art History Conference, taking place at University College London.

About the Presentation:

As climate breakdown tests the ecological limits of heavy agriculture, how have artists exposed the entwined colonial and environmental histories of land and proposed ecocentric practices based on more-than-human comradeship and care? These questions are addressed through Anetta Mona Chişa’s One Are (2021), which translated the Roman unit of territory into a 100m2 inverted cast of a ploughed field to reveal the materiality of the soil in its earthy imprint of tilling, cracking and erosion. Also considered is Cooking Sections’ For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted (2019), which engaged with the histories of chernozem from the Ukrainian steppe, from the terror of Soviet grain requisitioning to the impact of shifting climatic zones. The artist duo also collaborated with lawyers to legally enshrine the defence of the soil against capitalist extractivism, encapsulating the planetary tipping point in attitudes towards what anthropologist Kristina Lyons calls the “complex self-organising system” underground.

Image: Anetta Mona Chişa, One Are (2021)

[olderthannetfic]

Not to be mean, and this is honestly more of a "If the shoe fits" thing, but I really feel like too many people have no idea about nuance. They'll take one or the other, even if they seem to claim that they understand nuance. It's really fucking frustrating, because someone will claim to understand that there's nuance and then you mention something having nuances and the first thing the person does is decide that nope, everything is black and white, and clearly you stating nuances means you're a bad person.

Even just stating this I've noticed people who side eye and take the worst bad faith interpretation and going from there. Not even bothering to understand or even knowing a corner of the picture. It feels like it comes from an almost kinda self-righteous ecocentrical opinion on things. Nuance exists but only if I decide what they are, not you.

--

A lot of people seem to be operating under the misconception that only they are smart.

[eesirachs]

Hi Sam, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the tension between the anthropocentrism found in the Bible—where the earth and the natural world are seen as existing primarily to serve human needs—and how this perspective might contribute to our current climate discussions. Do you think this view exacerbates the harm to the natural world, and should we instead adopt a more inclusive, ecocentric perspective?

ps: i haven’t read laudato si, but would love your thoughts on this as well!

the hebrew bible reads, rather, as a register of ethical relationality—within and without human-human interactions. with attention, this god forms the natural landscape, occupies it with fruit and river, with things made from clay and animals as their partners. materiality in the ancient near east was like that—how flesh and dirt and gods and creature negotiated themselves was less a thing of difference than sameness. the self included things like mud, votives, totemic animals, the earth. as the bible moves through its narrative, it turns and returns to this kind of materiality that refuses to be parsed out. the prophets are their skin-mantles; grain sacrifice is fed to animals; sign-acts speak through and to bushes, cows, water. rather than a rubric of dominating environments, there is here a faith that rests upon and in those environments. laudato si attempts to hold this—and it might move further, it might hold onto the earth in the way faith narratives need it to, have long since needed it to

[mariacallous]

The Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine is no longer a hotspot for ‘dark tourism’ but a crime scene - its brief occupation by Moscow’s troops in 2022 is now part of a case being built by Ukrainian prosecutors accusing Russia of ‘ecocide’.

There are few places in the world where the line between safety and danger feels so thin, yet those who work inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone have become so inured to the war raging around them that even an air raid siren barely seems to register – it’s just a drill, they say, or another Russian MiG.

Thirty-eight years since a catastrophic explosion in Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site in northern Ukraine speaks to the mismanagement and denial of the Soviet Union’s final decade and the horror of war now raging between Russia and Ukraine, connecting the silence of the Brezhnev government in the wake of the blast to the present era of disinformation.

The explosion, one of the worst man-made disasters in human history, left the nearby town of Pripyat uninhabitable due to the radiation that was released; 20 years later, the site became a magnet for ‘dark tourism’, albeit small-scale in the beginning and heavily controlled.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian forces quickly occupied Pripyat and the Chernobyl site, only to be ousted at the end of that March in heavy fighting in which, according to state data seen by BIRN, 169 Ukrainian soldiers were taken prisoner.

The threat of a new nuclear disaster is never far away.

“During the occupation, the local systems for detection of radiation were turned off, computers were broken and stolen, premises were looted by the Russian soldiers,” said Serhiy Kireev, general director of Ecocentre, the Ukrainian state body that monitors radiation in the exclusion zone and administers water protection measures.

[dailyanarchistposts]

We don’t want autonomy

Daniel and Miriam live in the community Juan Lincopan, at Ranquilhue, with their three daughters. The community consists of about 300 families living on 400 hectares, and is trying to retake another 1000 hectares. They live amongst gentle, rolling hills, partially forested, above the northwest part of the Lleu Lleu. Alongside their house, which they’ve just finished building themselves, Daniel and Miriam have a large garden, and higher up on the hill a field for potato and barley. Someone in the community owns a tractor he rents out for plowing, otherwise they would plow with oxen. In their garden they practice organic agriculture, though they haven’t yet begun to implement this practice in the fields.

They have chickens and a steady supply of eggs, dogs that live in the space under the house and warn of anyone approaching, they make their own bread and cook and heat the house with a wood stove. The house has a water connection but no sewage; all the graywater drains into the garden, and at the edge of the yard is an outhouse.

Proudly, Miriam shows me a line of trees they have planted near their house, all native species like the notro, haulli, arayan, and hazelnut. “We found the seedlings up in the mountains and brought them down here,” she explains. The top of the hill is still covered in exotic eucalyptus trees, which drain the water table, but they’re harvesting the eucalyptus for firewood and slowly replacing them with native species.

They want their daughters to go to school at least until they learn how to read, but there doesn’t seem to be any great pressure to attend. During the days that we stay with them, one daughter seems to be playing hooky permanently. Miriam says she likes to bring her daughters along on land recovery actions so they can get a sense of the struggle, and an understanding that all this is their territory.

In the past, most young Mapuche went to the cities but now an increasing number are staying in the country. What they really need now is an independent school in their community, that will not train Chilean citizens but will be based in the Mapuche worldview.

Both Daniel and Miriam used to belong to the C.A.M. but they have since left it. “The C.A.M. came from the outside and did their work very well, but after the actions they’d leave, and who would receive the consequences? The community. We don’t think that’s a good strategy. We work inside the community to make the struggle from the inside. Even if it takes 15, 20 years.”

C.A.M., though it was the most radical Mapuche organization until recently, proposes autonomy instead of independence, meaning that the Mapuche would receive cultural and political rights, and perhaps their own regional government, within the Chilean state. Some of their lands would be returned to them, though ownership would still be formulated according to the existing capitalist laws. An increasing number of Mapuche are beginning to think that the time has come to openly propose independence, restoring the pre-1880 borders, as guaranteed by multiple treaties with the Spanish crown and the Chilean state, and restoring a sovereign Wallmapu, self-organized according to its own cultural traditions, circular, ecocentric, decentralized, and nonhierarchical.

We talk with Daniel and Miriam about all the similarities between the struggles in Wallmapu and in Euskal Herria, the Basque country. The Basques have won an autonomous government within the Spanish state, and some cultural rights for the preservation of their language, coupled with an even stronger repression that applies the antiterrorist law, torture, and long prison sentences against anyone who fights by any means for the full independence of the Basque people. If that’s autonomy, “then we won’t fight for autonomy,” laughs Miriam.

As the Mapuche struggle strengthens, the repression also becomes more effective. In the past, the police would come into Mapuche communities and get lost, but now they know where everything is. Now there are also police experts who know Mapudungun, the language, and there are more infiltrators, like one university student from Concepcion whose testimony led to several arrests, and who is currently working in Mexico, they say. “Bachelet,” the Socialist president who preceded Piñera, “had two faces. She showed a nice face, and then sent in the repression. There was more repression with her than there is now.”

In fact, a number of young Mapuche were killed by police during the previous government. Three cases are best known, and their names grace the walls of many towns and cities around the Mapuche territories. Alex Lemun, shot in the head near Angol. Matias Cachileo, shot in the back in January 2008 on the estate of a big landlord, his body fell into a canal and had to be fished out. Mendoza Colliu, shot in the back in August 2009. “All of them were shot from behind, none in the front,” Daniel explains gravely. “They were all running!” Miriam adds, and they start to laugh.

They talk about how the struggle is growing beyond the exhausting cycle of action, arrest, and support, and how they need to develop a legal aid organization, as a shield, to function alongside the more militant parts of the struggle.

The Mapuche are by no means victims. These confrontations have taken place during a forceful struggle for the recovery of their lands. At Ranquilhue, there used to be some trailers where timber employees lived, watching over the usurped lands. Around the 2004, the houses were set on fire, and the workers and their families were burned out. Then the state set up a makeshift command center where a number of police lived, to guard the timber plantation. Chile’s strategy of control is highly legalistic, so instead of hiring mercenaries or paramilitaries as they might in other countries, the timber corporations rely directly on police protection.

Around 2006, it was time for the police to go. This time, the community members didn’t come in the night, but in the daytime, in their hundreds, and forced out the police. Since then, that particular pine plantation has been unprotected, and the community has begun clearing it so they can plant fields. Up until then, the forestry company wanted to rent out land right on the banks of the lake, the Lleu Lleu, to build a tourist hotel. The local Mapuche would receive employment, Daniel relates with disgust, working at the hotel for the tourists, selling them vegetables, cleaning their toilets. After the police were forced out, the hotel project was put on hold. Some tourist cabins owned by outsiders were also torched around this time. Around Ranquilhue there are a few vacation cabins owned by Mapuche and rented out in the summers to generate some income, but they are low key and exist on the terms of the community members themselves.

There is, however, a problem with indigenous capitalism. Daniel and Miriam relate one story of a community member who used his lands for small-scale agribusiness, and others who kicked out the logging companies only to continue to harvest and sell exotic trees on that land. But the only companies able to buy the lumber were the very same logging companies, so in the end they didn’t care who controlled or managed the land as long as it continued producing under a capitalist logic. Recreating capitalism within their struggle is a recognized danger.

And then there are Mapuche politicians. There are those who work with the government, and those who try to form political parties to co-opt the struggle, “but there is no Mapuche political party, it doesn’t exist, because we closed the door and they’re left on the outside.”

“The Mapuche can have their independence, but if they lack the spiritual side of things it’s nothing. A Mapuche without newen is not Mapuche.” Newen, they explain, means strength, but it is also the strength of nature, or the energy one receives from the natural world. “The time when the sky goes from dark to light is when you receive all your strength.” Accordingly, there is a specific Mapuche ritual that one undertakes in times of difficulty, getting up before dawn to ask for strength and draw on the power of the world.

[youareatree]

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.

- Ghosh, A. (2022) The Nutmeg's Curse.

[newtsnaturethings]

Okay so I’m taking an environmental ethics and policy class and the most recent module was about Natural Asset Companies (NACs) as a means of environmental conservation and it’s giving me some Thoughts TM.

ecology flavored rant incoming:

The idea of assigning a monetary or capital value to “ecosystem services” feels viscerally wrong to me. It goes against the very nature of ecology and ecosystems. The science of ecology is about the connection of all these moving parts at various temporal and spatial scales. Trying to add capitalism to that sets up this…hierarchy of what “services” are the “most useful”. This makes zero sense in an ecocentric context. How do you assign what “service” is more important? Is it based on how much money it makes? The cultural significance? And who or what is making the final decision on how to rank these services in order of importance? This is a very capitalist mindset to apply to something that exists WAY outside that narrow framework. A piece of an ecosystem doesn’t have to “earn its keep” for the right to exist. It simply does. And that in itself is worthy of respect. Ecosystems don’t function based on the way one species wants them too, and trying to exert that level of control over them does not work. Humans are just as much a part of the ecosystem as the rest of the planet. We are participants along for the ride; we don’t call the shots.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the societal implications in all this! NACs will be motivated by interest groups with the most financial influence and power. So…do marginalized groups like POC and Indigenous People get a say in this? Even though they’ve been historically left out of or outright screwed over in a lot of “going green” initiatives? How intersectional will this component of the conservation movement really be if it’s motivated almost exclusively by profit and benefitting those who are able to invest heavily from the get go? If the conservation movement is leaving groups of people behind, then it’s to start over and build it up again with everyone at the table for input.

And yes I’m aware that “this is how society works etc etc” it doesn’t have to. It really doesn’t have to. And hey, maybe financially motivated entities like NACs have their part to play in the conservation movement, but they sure as heck should NOT be the most powerful or influential ones leading the charge.

[autizmogenderia]

jreg has ruined my brain we were talking about ecocentrism in class and my first thought was "as opposed to eco-extremism"

[1966loveminuszeronolimit]

I found two cool sticks outside today. #Bus #Commute #EcoCentric