Transnational Grassroots Action for Ecology

1
Transnational Grassroots Action for Ecology
Justice A Global Immune System?

• Beyond environmental treaties
• Contentious transnational politics
• Sustainability justice
• Indigenous peoples issues
• Large dams water
• A global immune system?

2
The zone of environmental treaties

• Transboundary global commons issues
• Privileges territorial sovereignty
• Most environmental degradation occurs locally,
  but has transnational social causes
• Authoritative, stabilized knowledge base
• Privileges universal scientific rationality
• Other knowledges are marginalized
• Nation-states and their institutional constructs
  are the ultimate authorities
• Social movements, NGOs industry vie for
  influence

3
Interstate regimes as a subset of institutional
forms
Destabilization of knowledge
Zone of international regimes
Hybridization of authority
Deterritorialization of nature
4
Contentious transnational politics

• Complex issues, knowledge bases authority
  structures
• Intersection of human rights, environment
• Multiple knowledges, diverse stakeholders
• Local degradation with transnational causes
• Political engagement beyond the nation-state
• Environmental governance as protecting places and
  people rather than managing transboundary
  pollution global commons
• Watersheds water supply
• Dams, safe water access, industry practices
• Conserving biodiversity
• Ecosystems
• Forests
• Deserts
• High mountains

5
Sustainability

• Of what?
• Decoupling economic growth from throughput
• Renewable vs. nonrenewable resources
• Organisms, species, ecosystems, life support
  systems
• There is no away and people live there.
• For whom?
• People? Which ones? Whose common future?
• For how long?
• Future generations the futurity problem

6
Elements of Justice

• Distributive
• Equity
• Custom
• Desert
• Procedural
• Civil liberties participation
• Justice as fairness
• Rawlsian justice veil of ignorance
• Ecological justice?
• Beyond anthropocentrism

7
Environmental Justice Indigenous Peoples

• The Fourth World
• Globalization on the periphery of the periphery
• 15 of population have traditional claims to 25
  of worlds land resources
• 6,000 cultural groups
• Most will be extinct by 2050
• Human rights-environment link
• Oil, mining, dams, hunting fishing rights
• Cultures as systems of knowledge
• Cultural survival sustainability

8
Large Dams The Narmada

• Nehru dams as modern temples of India
• Green revolution irrigation
• 4-fold increase in food production since 1950
• 25 million displaced by dams
• Peasants, dalits, adivasis
• Adivasis 40 of displaced, 8 of pop.
• Tribunal Award land for land
• Narmada River divides North South India
• 30 large dams planned

9
Popular resistance to Narmada Dams

• Narmada Bachao Andolan
• Started 1985, all volunteer, women-led
• Medha Patkar main leader
• Satyagraha, fasting, stand-ins
• Transnational alliance
• Multilateral Development Bank Campaign
• International Rivers Network
• Patkar testified to Congress in 1989
• World Bank reform movement
• WB withdrew in 1993, began environmental reforms

10
Water Privatization

• Problem 40 of worlds people lack safe water
• World Bank solution markets
• Private investment, raise prices
• Trained 10,000 professionals in DCs
• All IMF loans since 1998 require water
  privatization
• People on private water
• From 40 million (1955) to 500 million (2000)
• Cochabamba Latin American populism
• Symbolism of water
• Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature
• Ken Conca, Governing Water

11
A global immune system?

• The purpose of a global immune system is to
  identify what is not life affirming and contain,
  neutralize, or eliminate it.
• Is this a good metaphor for the global
  sustainability movement?
• We will either come together as one, globalized
  people, or we will disappear as a civilization.
  We must reclaim our role as engaged agents of
  our continued existence.
• Is this true? What happens to individuality under
  this view?