Читать книгу Lessons in Environmental Justice - Группа авторов - Страница 37

After hundreds of years of colonialism, we are certainly living in times that many of our ancestors would have seen as dystopian. Often in dystopian science fiction stories, the main characters find themselves in a situation where dominant groups of people exercise nearly absolute power over them. For example, the popular movie The Matrix is about a time in the future when artificial intelligence (AI) has dispossessed humans of their land. Decades of abuse by humans and AI have heavily polluted the environment. AI now uses humans for energy it needs to survive. It created a system in which humans who are being tapped for energy have the illusion that they are living free and fulfilling lives. In reality, humans live under nearly absolute domination and do not consent to the way they are treated by AI machines.

Were our ancestors several hundred years ago to have heard a story about what life is like today for Indigenous peoples, it would likely have sounded to them like the story of The Matrix, where the United States is the AI and Indigenous peoples, among other oppressed groups, are the humans. Like the characters in The Matrix, our situation involves living under nearly total domination, and our possibilities for liberation are greatly limited because of the lack of consent. The educational, social, cultural, and political institutions of the United States seek to create the false reality that Indigenous peoples were not violently dispossessed of land and that U.S. colonialism is largely over. In this false reality, Indigenous peoples are seen as either tragically eliminated or romantically clinging to a holistic environmental ethic.

In terms of environmental injustice, our ancestors would have likely believed that today’s times are ones in which environmental destruction has occurred at the same time that relationships of consent have been diminished. Today, through actions such as the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Unist’ot’en Camp, Indigenous peoples largely do not have the right to consent to the actions of other groups that affect environments in which Indigenous peoples live, work, and play. There is a lack of concern, broadly, with whether our nonhuman relatives consent to how they are treated by industries such as oil and gas, commercial agriculture, and mining. The landscape-scale environmental change caused by these industries demonstrates little concern for the well-being of nonhuman lives and ecosystems. Our ancestors would have also noticed a marked lack of respect for those entities for whom we cannot consent, such as the climate system. It seems like some people will not be sufficiently concerned about climate change until it is too late.

As a solution, when Indigenous peoples invoke their own cosmologies and philosophies, they seek to bring attention both to the maintenance of colonial domination and to Indigenous traditions of environmental stewardship that offer underrepresented visions for environmentally just futures. Indigenous cosmologies and philosophies call for concrete reforms, such as land reclamation, at the same time that they suggest shifts in consciousness of human relationships to the nonhuman world. When Indigenous peoples advocate for their own philosophies and cosmologies, they should not be mistaken for expressions of spirituality reminiscent of the conceptions of faith, spirituality, or transcendence that are common in some types of Christianity. Rather, Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies often refer to moral relationships, especially moral qualities such as consent, that are connected systematically with human relationships to the environment.

Environmental justice, then, is about consent, but not just any type of consent. It is about understanding the ways in which consent and dissent are part of our daily lives, engagement with politics and economics, and our connections to the land and nonhuman worlds around us. Indigenous environmental justice pushes us to be aware of the different dimensions of consent around us. But, again, consent is just one moral quality, and further study and practice of Indigenous environmental traditions speaks to many other moral relationships, such as responsibility and accountability, and moral qualities, such as trust and reciprocity.