Sacrifice zones

Sacrifice zones

Week 11: Who’s expected to adapt to climate change?

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, October 14, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/11.1

Main reading: Jessee (2022)

What is climate change?

Figure 1: Change in the global average surface temperature from the historical average over the 20th century (Lindsey and Dahlman 2024).

How do you feel about that?

Here’s a Padlet which asks “How do you feel about climate change?”

https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/what-does-climate-change-feel-like-qsyowd0r2si9pyxr

(The link is on the Canvas page for this week as well.)

Reflect on how climate change makes you feel.

If you get stuck, ask the person sitting next to you how they feel.

Read what other people have to say. What do you notice?

Nature is cultural, and nature is an object of political struggle

There are different perspectives one can take on people’s relationship to the environment.

Human ecology: The various ways that people adapt to, make use of, and are constrained by their environment, with particular attention to the cultural variations in how people relate to their environments, and how these feed into ecological systems that condition how people live.

Political ecology: “The phrase ‘political ecology’ combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself.” (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 17)

Climate change is best understood as a political problem, a problem of power, domination, and struggle.

Kayapo, the Xingu River, and the Brazilian state: A real-life Avatar?

Resistance to Brazil’s plans for hydroelectric dams in the Amazon has unfolded over many decades.

• 1979: Dam sites, and flood zones, on the Xingu River identified.
• 1988: Paiakan, other Kayapo chiefs, and ethnobotanist Darrell Posey present their opposition to hydroelectric dams on the Xingu to the World Bank.
• 1989: Meeting of Indigenous Peoples of the Xingu convenes, attended by 3000 people, including international NGOs, activists, media, and Sting.
• 1990s: Spurred by Indigenous Amazonian and international environmental activism, the Brazilian government delays plans for Xingu River hydroelectric project and redesigns the dams to mitigate flooding and other environmental harms.
• 2000s: Redesigned dam projects are approved, yet construction is halted by court decisions. Multiple court battles over the projects continue for several years. Brazil signs and enacts an international treaty on Indigenous rights.
• 2004: Lula da Silva directs his government to resume work on hydroelectric projects. (In a 2009 meeting with Indigenous groups he promises not to “shove [the dam] down their throats.”)
• after 2009: Xingu River peoples resume their campaigns against the dam projects as legal and adminstrative obstacles are overcome. They are supported by an even wider network of scientists, conservation organizations, and international bodies.
• 2010: James Cameron, director of Avatar (2009)¹⁾, joins protests over the Xingu River dams, noting in several reports that the projects are “a real-life Avatar” (Phillips 2010; Ross 2010; see also Hance 2009).
• 2012: In spite of stronger and broader opposition than ever, construction commences on the Belo Monte dam. Protests, court challenges continue throughout the 2010s, and construction is halted and resumed several times.
• 2016: Belo Monte dam completed and begins operation. Activists and Indigenous communities continue their campaigns, now focusing on environmental damage.

See Pérez (2016).

Hashtag-NoDAPL, or Standing with Standing Rock

In September 2016, “water protectors” of the Standing Rock tribe in North Dakota established a camp to blockade the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) (Whyte 2017; see also Estes and Dhillon 2019).

• The camp was established on the pipeline route, on ancestral land yet outside of the contemporary Standing Rock reservation.
  • The tribe had previously sued to stop construction, arguing that its path over the Missouri River would threaten the reservation’s water supply.
• While framed as a protest action, protectors and their supporters believed they were creating a space of “ceremony, prayer, and water protection” (Whyte 2017, 156).
• Water protection was, furthermore, connected to traditions of self-government that had been suppressed under US colonialism (Whyte 2017, 159).

In partial contrast to other cases of enviromental protest, the Standing Rock occupation connected Indigenous self-government, traditional environmental knowledge, and an Indigenous ethics of duty to the environment.

The human rights of the Whanganui River

An agreement in 2014 was reached between the New Zealand government and the Māori iwi (tribe) of the Whanganui River (also known as Te Awa Tupua). This agreement included a decision to treat the river itself as a person.

• The river would have a legal personality, that is, the same rights as an individual.
• According to the agreement, its rights and interests would be safeguarded by guardians, one representing the iwi and another representing the Crown.

The personhood of Te Awa Tupua has two effects

• It validates the Whanganui iwi claims to an inalienable tie to the landscape; and
• It extendes a fiction from Western legal theory usually applied to corporations.
  • In particular, by recognizing Te Awa Tupua as a legal person, the agreement also established that it was, in essence, immortal and had interests that should be protected now and into the future in perpetuity.
  • The idea that natural landscapes have a fictive personality and thus right to exist in perpetuity also informed Xingu River peoples’ activism. For instance, an organization representing their interests is called the “Xingu Alive Forever Movement” (“From the Xingu Alive Forever Movement: A Letter of Denouncement and Indignation Against the Approval of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam’s Provisional License.” 2010).

The personhood of Te Awa Tupu is the culmination of a broader rethinking of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi since the 1970s (see Charpleix 2018).

Global warming is a matter of justice, not change

Climate change and its effects are a lot like other conflicts over land, resources, and the use of an environment.

Carbon pollution is an excess and a maladaptive use of the global environment, but this is not simply a story of the consequences of an unsustainable way of life.

Like the privatization of land, carbon pollution is equivalent to the taking away the benefits of something—a healthy planetary ecosystem—that is in fact shared by everyone.

References and further reading

Blaikie, Piers M., and Harold Brookfield. 1987. Land degradation and society. London: Metheun. http://archive.org/details/landdegradations0000blai.

Charpleix, Liz. 2018. “The Whanganui River as Te Awa Tupua: Place-Based Law in a Legally Pluralistic Society.” The Geographical Journal 184 (1): 19–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12238.

Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon, eds. 2019. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvr695pq.

“From the Xingu Alive Forever Movement: A Letter of Denouncement and Indignation Against the Approval of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam’s Provisional License.” 2010. Amazon Watch (blog). February 4, 2010. https://amazonwatch.org/news/2010/0204-from-the-xingu-alive-forever-movement-a-letter-of-denouncement-and-indignation-against-the-approval-of-the-belo-monte-hydroelectric-dams-provisional-license.

Hance, Jeremy. 2009. “The Real Avatar Story: Indigenous People Fight to Save Their Forest Homes from Corporate Exploitation.” Mongabay Environmental News. December 22, 2009. https://news.mongabay.com/2009/12/the-real-avatar-story-indigenous-people-fight-to-save-their-forest-homes-from-corporate-exploitation/.

Jessee, Nathan. 2022. “Reshaping Louisiana’s coastal frontier: managed retreat as colonial decontextualization.” Journal of Political Ecology 29 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2835.

Lindsey, Rebecca, and LuAnn Dahlman. 2024. “Climate Change: Global Temperature.” NOAA Climate.gov. January 18, 2024. http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature.

Pérez, Mark Sabaj. 2016. “Timeline of the Controversial Belo Monte Megadam in Brazil.” American Scientist, December 29, 2016. https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/timeline-of-the-controversial-belo-monte-megadam-in-brazil.

Phillips, Tom. 2010. “Avatar Director James Cameron Joins Amazon Tribe’s Fight to Halt Giant Dam.” The Observer, April 17, 2010, sec. Environment. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/18/avatar-james-cameron-brazil-dam.

Ross, Miriam. 2010. “‘Avatar Is Real,’ Say Tribal People.” Survival International. January 25, 2010. https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/5466.

Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2017. “The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism.” Red Ink 19 (1): 154–69.