Human Ecological Cultures — an Antidote to Eco-fascism
From Brahmanical colonial legacies to eco-fascist violence, conservation has historically rendered indigenous communities invisible and disposable. Can we do better?
Many people are finding peace with the deaths due to COVID-19, abrupt lock-downs, poverty and hunger. Many social media posts have been shared that said the skies have become clearer and that (some) people can breathe cleaner air. On the other hand, racialised citizens and Muslims in India faced accusations of spreading COVID-19, and on several occasions, have even faced violence. One such post, “Let Covid run free, it has the potential to kill millions of us” should concern us because of its environmental determinism, placing nature over people. This simple statement renders a very large population of humans disposable, asserting that nature can save us only if these disposable humans die and that it is okay if humans die if nature is to be saved.
We see this pattern repeated again in the popularity of the Aarey Forest protests, against the felling of trees for the construction of the Mumbai metro, where elites took to the streets and social media, to save the ‘lungs’ of Mumbai while ignoring the historical precarity (socio-economic vulnerabilities) of Tribal people of Aarey and their displacement for development projects.
Colonialism, Eurocentricism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and Brahmanical hegemony presupposes eco-fascism, orienting people towards an environmentally deterministic worldview, that sees people as a problem. All are based on the faulty notion that people and nature cannot coexist, and that the earth and its resources lack the wherewithal to support 8 billion people — all while continuing to exploit natural resources for profit. We choose conservation and protectionist approaches in our environmentalism and neglect the human, seeing all people as the “same”, while ignoring that in reality, we daily think of some people as more “disposable” than others.
In the context of environmental protection, the policies and programmes are designed to protect ecology from Tribal and Indigenous people, disregarding traditional forest management and relationships, and conflating their close interdependence with ecosystems with a lack of care and concern. This systematically erases out marginalized people from their original habitat, leaving them disposable and displaced.
The Eastern Himalayan region has been ‘discovered’ as a biodiversity hot-spot; the discovery entrenched in (Brahmanical) colonialism and Eurocentricism and its interest in the exotic. What is wild, exotic and discoverable for the environmentalist is actually known, local, pretty common for the indigenous folk. In the Eastern Himalayan region, we have witnessed national and global interventions in the forms of state sanctioned violence, development projects, ‘conservation and protection’ of ecologies and endangered species and so on. And each of these interventions affect the human folk along with the ecology and biodiversity of this region. For instance, displacement of people due to developmental projects, or by turning Tribal and Indigenous lands into Reserve Forests and protected areas.
Let us consider these experiential examples to understand interventions and its effect. A friend of mine, who is Khasi and native of Ri Bhoi district in Meghalaya, was researching the biodiversity of bananas and farming methods in his district. While we were discussing his dissertation we came to realise that in his language (and society) there is no concept of a farmer. A ‘farmer’ culturally and historically doesn’t exist where my friend comes from. The word in Khasi language used for ‘farmer’ is nongrep — a person who works on the field/land.
Another Khasi friend reads nongrep along with gender. Even though Khasi is a matrilineal society, only men are considered nongrep and women are culturally made to do housework even when they do participate in agricultural activities. The elderly women in the house do go to the farm to work. She says that of all the literature she has read, she has only read U nongrep which denotes ‘male’ and never Ka nongrep which denotes ‘female’. Khasi, a matrilineal and patriarchal society, genders nature and biodiversity, for earth( ka khyndew) and forest( ka khlaw) thus indicating that nongrep denotes masculine and the fertility of earth and forest is seen as feminine.
Similarly, in Rongmei some say Lau-tan-mei means field-work-person and Laucmei means ‘the person created by the field’ none of which mean farmer. The word ‘farmer’, with its colonialist and feudal focus on private ownership, taxation and settled agriculture thus disrupts and erodes self-sustaining existing indigenous & traditional agriculture, embodied in the traditional semantics of nongrep, lautanmei and laucmei.
The interventions have undertones and evidence of (eco)fascism. Colonial language assumes a lot. Not only do words lose meaning in translation, but this new language as an intervention designs policies, programmes and development projects. Not only are the societies in Eastern Himalaya forced to fit in the definition of India, but laws like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) forcefully fit most of this region under ‘rural’ and exploit economic vulnerabilities for ‘development’.
Consider the case of Nagaland: between 1947–2010, 10,023.13 acres of land was acquired — both private and clan owned Common Property Resources(CPRs) — for environmental protection projects which has led to displacement of 65 people and 5966 Project Affected People (PAP). The land acquired for environmental protection is the highest as compared to land acquired for any other purposes. Similarly, as a response to COVID-19, Jammu and Kashmir ordered felling of lakhs of Russian poplar trees which were introduced to the landscape of J&K in 1981–82 through World Bank-aided Social Forestry Project. The project’s aim was to “generate paid employment for the rural poor and improve environmental conditions’’ through plantations that provide fuel-wood, small timber, etc.
This disruptive intervention has led to huge losses for the people especially now with the changes in land and domicile policies of J&K in the name of development which shifts the control of land from local, indigenous folks — who lived with the biodiversity — to industries. In both cases, “disposable” — indigenous & local communities — are severed from traditionally held lands.
Historically self-sustained communities now find themselves forced to compete within a profit-driven capitalist framework, deteriorating societies and cultures, commodifying nature and wildlife and leading to the endangerment of various species (read: Asian and African elephants for ivory). There is also an intentional (mis)reading of geography and culture which not only fails the people but also ecologies interdependent with people and their cultures. There are specific regions in India which happens to be populated by marginalised groups that are also rich in natural resources. The state, the intellectuals and the “well-meaning” NGOs by default see natural resources as a source of capital, and what they fail to see is that these resources are in fact, very simply put, culture to the communities living with them. This systemic disregard of culture invariably leads to environmental discrimination.
Both nature and economic development are prioritised, but not human life: indigenous folk are not only “disposed” but also struggle for cultural rights. People reach out to our nearest resources to survive in this world. For a middle-class, savarna city-dweller, the nearest resources are private education and/or caste-capital. For most of the people in the Eastern Himalayan region, this socio-cultural resource is the biodiversity they live with. But, when these societies are forced into a capital driven economy, they no longer can access this basic cultural capital — deepening inequalities among members of the community.
The rising inequality is also because of the erosion of communitarian and customary laws governing biodiversity and natural resources conservation, by legislative regimes, state violence and concerns regarding autonomy. For instance, there has been legislation to denounce Scheduled Tribe status to Khasi women marrying a non-Khasi. This is not only to control women’s movement and mobility, but to also have a stronger patriarchal hold over the fertility, i.e. earth and forest, of the community. Colonialism in the Americas pushed matrilineal tribes like the Cherokee to focus on hunting, trade, warfare, politics, raising the status of men and diminishing women. Thus, the introduction of capital-driven economy to a self-sustained one, devalues women’s work, further entrenching gender inequality. In many cases, existing inequalities are deepening with repeated and coercive interventions.
The environmental determinism model has not only pitted nature against humans, but rendered some people more equal than others. One of the only ways forward could also mean going backwards where we must assume indigenous community relationships with nature and allow this relationship to deconstruct and construct itself. In a territorial, neo-liberal globalised world, external influences cannot be ignored.
One of the only humane suggestions then would be to withdraw control over the people, land and natural resources of Eastern Himalayas — control which has subjected the region to cultural violence by state terrorism, reserving and protecting forests and damming rivers, locking communities off their once traditional lands and displacing them from their historic landscape. Many of these environmental interventions have invariably harmed what it has forcefully tried to conserve and protect.
The central concern of all environmentalists should be structural changes which values human life while not devaluing (exploiting) nature — to make a life with dignity possible. We must move from division and exploitation, towards interdependence and balance by building and restoring human ecological cultures, the most dignified way of living for the communities that have long cultivated and lived with sustainable ecologies.
The author would like to extend their deepest gratitude to their friends Manbhalang Ranee, Ila Lyngdoh and Kabithui Rongmei for their support.
The author urges the readers to engage in pictures taken by photographers, Ashuzhiio Chobotte and Shiihrayio Krichena from Mao, Manipur. Grateful to Lohe Lokajiia Victoria for sharing their work.
Suraj is an independent researcher with a Masters in Sociology and Social Anthropology. Their areas of interest cuts across migration, citizenship, gender, sexuality, health, caste, geography and so on. They can be reached via email at kamdarsuraj@gmail.com.
This article was commissioned and originally published for Balipara Foundation in its The Himalayan publication which can be found here.
