Global Political Ecology as Spiritual Praxis

This is a take home essay I wrote for course 4229 at ISS in April, 2023.

“Interconnectedness” always comes to my mind when thinking of global political ecology. Recognizing that one thing that happens here could be traced to the other side of the planet, or one local incident could associate with the global system, shows that the world is inseparable, intertwined with harm and pain, as well as love and care. For the complex multiple relations, layers and scales of socio-political-ecological issues, there might be no solutions but only the continuing practices of thinking, reflecting and finding ways to go.

Processes contain lessons to be learned. This is how my life has worked, and I assume it could also be how the world works: things repeat similarly until the lessons are learned, and then move on to the new lessons. I started constructing my own worldview, or world, through things I encountered and experienced around eight years ago. I prefer to use the term “Universe”, referring to the greatest entirety that contains everything and arranges our lessons. I think the Universe is also the pluriverse, “a world that many worlds fit” (Escobar, 2020, ix) — — everything is together as an enormous continuum, is all different and therefore all the same.

Perhaps problems emerge when the dominant systems try to frame everything within and block the natural dynamics, forcing pluriverses to fit into and function under certain standardized regulations. The frame creates comparisons and judgments of distinctions, and inequalities would be produced if the hierarchy is added to the frame. When the stabilized boundaries are traversed, frames and structures could be challenged and dissolved. I think global political ecology is also about crossing the hegemonic borders, to acknowledge and free the pluriverse. It is difficult to formulate a simplified but clear enough statement of the current hegemonies that should be confronted because the elements are linking and overlapping with each other, including, for instance, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, Western colonial modernity (Quijano, 2007), and many others. I read from Kimmerer (2013) that in Potawatomi, about seventy percent of words are verbs, showing the animacy of the world; but the languages I can use now do not provide me with such competence to describe the living hegemony as a whole.

Yet, global political ecology is to do the multi-dimensional puzzles together, with a relatively significant theme of politics intersecting ecology. It is to see the nuances from various angles, especially those which have been made invisible for a long time, throughout the not-necessarily-linear contextual processes, from old scars to ongoing open wounds, to healing and creation of natureculture (Haraway, 2003). Taking Inoue’s words, it is for “understanding the struggle of maintaining many worlds on a single Earth” (2018, p. 25). We need not only to see the ecological narratives that our planet is badly damaged, and creatures are threatened to be extinct at this moment, but also how it has happened and is still happening in relation to human politics and societies.

Sorrow, anxiety and fear are embedded in or produced by the prevalent narratives of resource scarcity and the crisis of Earth. Indeed, these are threats that could drive actions and changes for good. Such emergencies could also become excuses for local exclusions and inequalities created by related institutions (Mehta, Huff, and Allouche, 2019, p. 222). Regarding this, the only thing I can and want to state is that I am fortunate and privileged to choose to present the possibility of approaching pluriversal well-being rather than avoiding the foreseen catastrophes. My current position is at where I am neither struggling to survive nor being tightly trapped. There is no immediate threat to me, so my imagination is able to grow towards vitality and prosperity.

As I can only speak from my memories, experiences and positionality with limitations, the following would be my main gate for communicating global political ecology with my surroundings — — amplifying hope and delight. Scarcity could be relative, or even an illusion, if we only take what we essentially need and share our abundance. Our common end, our lesson to be learned, is to live harmoniously together. We may be able to perceive abundant worlds while interacting through attentive senses with more-than-humans (Rose, 2013). We could acknowledge the beauty and fun in not-yet-be-categorized small things again as a child newly exploring the world, see them not as lifeless objects or inferior living beings but as playmates that co-experience the moments. We could make the perceptions even richer with learned information through growing up and without covering or denying their intrinsic value and wholeness. We could cherish all these.

The above-described engagement would be a form of care that might be very difficult but worthy to practice. Care is crucial, especially for reconnecting and healing these separated, wounded worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Care must be at the center for us to sustain, recover from traumas, and grow into healthy balanced worlds. I have been eager to ask: How can care spread in the web of interconnectedness? How can we go beyond “care for” and try to “care as”(*1) since we are all part of natureculture on Earth (Haraway, 2003; Suchet-Pearson et al., 2013, p185)? However, these questions could only show how it partly looks from my world. I am responsible for answering myself. I imagine if we all raise the profound questions from our worlds, find our own answers and put them together, the pluriverse would continually develop itself.

So far, it has been interesting to see myself feeling awkward, hesitating whether to write down something that has been bearing in my heart for several years — — I believe that the Universe is spirituality. All the previous text is contained within this belief, and this is the first time I articulate it in my supposed-to-be academic writing. The difficulty of enunciation I experienced proves that colonial modernity has rooted in me. I once primarily valued rationality, and I had modern scientific education. I might be implicitly afraid of not being accepted by my surroundings. My brain is still not completely decolonized, but global political ecology provides an academic space where I can finally feel safe enough to mention spirituality. After crossing the boundary in my mind, I think I will be able to keep mentioning it.

Continuing from the statement of my belief, plus the fact that I have been switching between writing this essay and the one for Decoloniality in the Development Research Context, I would like to briefly share what has been happening since non-human agency is also important in global political ecology. These two essays have been developing each other, and my writing switches by following the informational feeling flow through me. I started there by describing my informative feelings and then wrote about why I would use world-travelling (Lugones, 1987) and sentipensar (Escobar, 2020), and I started here with interconnectedness and then wrote about what global political ecology means to me — — but they are all together.

I cannot remember all the detailed orders in the linear timeline about how my feelings have been flowing. Nevertheless, one sure thing is that I wrote down “spirituality” without obviously showing how it works in my words in this essay so far. In contrast, I probably had shown more of it without explicitly mentioning the term in the other. I sense-think the pluriverse from the continual switches of my writing, a tiny scale of it, that these two essays seem separate but are simultaneously acting coherently as a whole. I have been seeing the overlaps of things that currently interest me, and all of them coincide the same core: moving towards love, just, balance, and health, among everything in relations as an entirety.

To stop myself from going too far and not being able to end, I would conclude within the scale of Earth: I think global political ecology is attempting to bring balance and health (back) on Earth by not only addressing ecological problems as the focus, but also their links with many different aspects, with politics as the other parallel main line, and with the globe as the main scope, but always crossing the boundaries — — in this sense, if I have to choose two most crucial concepts to me from the course, they would be care and more-than-human. I think the problematic political hegemonic ideologies were created psychologically by human consciousness, and to take part of disempowering them, the primary position belongs to me would be presenting better options than the dominantly operating ones.

However, I fundamentally think that our spiritual learning through all the processes is to understand love, just, health, and balance as a whole, and this wholeness is supposed to be our way to go. All in all, global political ecology is part of the praxis that could lead us toward there — — and this claim had just become the title of this essay.

*Note

1. I took the term “care as” from the literature stating to care as Country, referring that human is part of the country (in Australian Aboriginal English, more-than-human homeland), rather than “human v.s. country”. I was thinking that we are all part of the entirety, so we care as the entirety (which includes “I” and ”others”)

References

Escobar, A. (2020) Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Inoue, C. Y. A. (2018) ‘Worlding the Study of Global Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Voices from the Amazon’, Global Environmental Politics, 18(4), 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00479

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013) Braiding sweetgrass. First ed. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions.

Lugones, M. (1987) ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, Hypatia, 2(2), pp. 3–19.

Mehta, L., Huff, A. and Allouche, J. (2019) ‘The New Politics and Geographies of Scarcity’, Geoforum, 101, pp. 222–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.10.027

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2017) ‘Introduction: the disruptive thought of care’, in Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds, pp. 1–24.

Quijano, A. (2007) ‘Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353

Rose, D. B. (2013) ‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World’.Environmental Humanities, 3(1), pp. 93–109. https://doi-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248

Suchet-Pearson, S. et al. (2013) ‘Caring As country: Towards an Ontology of Co-Becoming in Natural Resource Management’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 54(2), pp. 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12018