1Cátedras CONACyT, Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), Mexico City, Mexico
2Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico
3Posgrado en Astrofísica, Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico
We do not understand what we see but see what we understand. Words shape the comprehension of our environment and set the space of possibilities we can access when decision making. In here we make the case for the use of Technocene instead of Anthropocene using well-grounded arguments in basic scientific principles. We already know that the Earth system has co-evolved with life phenomena (i.e., the evolution of atmosphere chemistry). What the Technocene idea makes clear is that as modern human societies exhibit an enormous coupling with technology and for the first time in human history that technology has the potential to modify the very core processes that drive Earth System dynamics, then Technology must be considered as a new dimension of analysis in the study of Earth system in its coevolution with life and particularly human beings.
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Technocene?
Ever since the seminal work of Crutzen (2002) where he proposed the Anthropocene concept as a new geological epoch, the concept has become very rapidly mainstream (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). Nonetheless, several critiques have been raised from different approaches. For once, Malm (2016) aims to develop a Marxist account of the planetary crisis, emphasizing the link with development (mainly carbon-centered) and capital accumulation. In the same line of thought, Moore (2016) has posed that beyond a technical geological focus of Anthropocene concept, there is a social reading of the idea developed in terms of the clear increases in scale, scope synchronicity, and rate/speed of environmental change, driven by capital accumulation. So, these scholars suggest that “Capitalocene” is a more historically appropriate term. Others as Haraway (2016a, b) thinks that Anthropocene and Capitalocene are seen as lending themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions. In that sense, the Chthulucene (her proposal), alternatively considers “multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen – yet.” Then humans are no longer the only relevant actors.
In terms of capital accumulation as a driver of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, we consider that this is only possible by using technologies that allow orders of magnitude more energy extraction (primordially) and other natural resources than before Anthropocene/Capitalocene. In recent work, Burger et al. (2017) have shown that meanwhile, humans organized as hunter-gatherers exhibit an energy flux 102–103 watts/km2; energy flux in modern cities ranges from 105 to 108 watts/km2 and surpasses global primary productivity on land (105 watts/km2 global average). Without the underlying technology that allowed this energy flux increase, capital accumulation would not have been possible at all, even if wanted. Even more, seeing the environmental trajectory of non-capitalist countries such as China, one may wonder that if the predominant social system would be non-capitalist, does the same or equivalent planetary crisis would have been reached? With regard to Chthulucene, our version of Technocene is based on the Technobiont ontology (López-Corona et al., 2019) that incorporates a multi-species perspective (Holobiont) as well as both biological co-evolution and niche construction, considering genome, symbiont, social and environmental inheritance.
We consider then, that our Technocene construction includes, on the one hand, the main aspects of a historic perspective and some other fundamental concerns of social science, including even some elements relevant from culture and power theorization. On the other hand, it also covers a multi-species non-anthropocentric perspective relevant to the Chthulucene perspective. Nonetheless, it’s the greatest strength is the system dynamics perspective as we will develop below.
The concept of Thechnocene is not new as it has been used by anthropologist Alf Hornborg (Hamilton et al., 2015) and the sociologist Martins (2018) whose make a historical and critical review of the role of science in technological development, reviewing the relationship between nature and society from an interdisciplinary perspective. His analysis, which examines the need for political ecology, environmental anthropology and the relationship between science and society, is valuable for understanding different concepts such as the one proposed in this letter from the different disciplines: the Technocene.
We must not lose sight of the fact that this concept is built within the theoretical framework of anthropology. This implies that there is a strong political, social, sociolinguistic, and cultural burden. So approaching the Technocene implies implicitly considering a linguistic approach and therefore lexicon. In this sense, considering the notion of Tecnocene, from this perspective it is worth taking up the reflection of Sen (2019) who suggests reflecting on the appropriate words based on the direct consequences of human reality imposed on the natural and artificial order: “If the first nuclear detonation immediately called to mind the paucity of language to represent reality as awe-inspiring as the mushroom cloud, then the Anthropocene similarly asks us to fashion a new language and expand our vocabulary to bear the weight of our contemporary moment.” So it is appropriate to use words that reveal as closely as possible the ontology of the phenomenon.
Which is in accordance with the position of Esposito (2019), because just as an ecocentric approach offers epistemological changes to anthropocentrism, in the same way, a methodology that considers a technocentric approach also suggests to include concepts and notions that allow addressing phenomena of ecological order and social with ontological, epistemological and ethical-political changes.
In this Mini-Review paper, we use the notion of Technocene as an environmental concept, in which Environmental Sciences and Earth Sciences converge, and as Hamilton et al. (2015) had pointed out, the post-Cartesian Social Science too. At the same time that interdisciplinary science is intertwined to explain environmental phenomena such as global warming. In this sense, the discussion in the literature about the concept of the Anthropocene is important. For example, from the ecosystem sciences, Malhi (2017) explores the functioning of the biosphere and its interactions with global change; while from a cultural evolution perspective Boyd and Richerson (1996) have studied the development of this geological era. This, without neglecting Haff’s vision. Haff (2014) who also proposes six key rules that mediate human beings and technology in the Anthropocene. For us, it is clear that thinking about the concept of the Anthropocene is exceeded in the face of technological development and its environmental impact (Cera, 2017). So treating environmental problems and their research from an anthropocentric approach is not adequate. On the other hand, ethical and political problems must be treated in their right dimension (Hensel, 2017), and for this, it is necessary to take into account that we are technological subjects that develop economically on the transformation of nature.
Of particular interest is the work of Peter Haff about how different human technological systems such as communication, transportation, bureaucratic and other systems are interlinked and actually act to metabolize energy (mostly fossil fuels) in a sort of global emergent entity with similarities to the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. The author calls this the Technosphere, which he considers the defining system of the Anthropocene and most important in the context of the present work, he thinks it is influential and even model what we might consider most intimately and essentially human: our ideas, personal purposes, feelings, and dreams.
In the same sense, a direct antecedent of the importance of niche construction is the seminal work of Herrmann-Pillath who has pointed out how technology co-evolve with other components of human culture such as its institutions in parallel with behavioral and biological evolution, constituting a key element of niche construction. This recognition is incorporated in what we think is a novel ontology, the Ecobiont, discussed in our previous work (López-Corona et al., 2019) and that makes our understanding of Technocene somehow different to previous proposals because is not only about the dominium of technology that enhances the human capacity for niche construction; it is also about the dominium of a new Ecobion, the Technobiont.
A Systems Dynamics Approach to Technocene Concept
Our approach in this work is based on the recognition that Earth is a complex system, that is maintained in a unique state far from thermodynamic equilibrium through the co-evolution of its biotic and abiotic components by maximizing the entropy production, a process that might be a thermodynamic imperative (Kleidon, 2009; Michaelian, 2012). The Evolution by natural selection considers one direction of this coupling but the other direction, Niche Construction, has been little studied. In previous work (López-Corona et al., 2019) we developed a new ontology, the Ecobiont, to take both directions into account.
The theoretical model for the Ecobiont ontology considers a set of interacting pools: genes (G), microbiome (g), and social (s); that co-evolve from some arbitrary time t to t’, through natural selection and niche construction. In contrast to how an abiotic component of the Earth system evolves from a pool of physicochemical components, biological and human systems do it with information stored not only in the genome (physiochemical component) but also in its culture, including technology. To make it clear, it is no longer only a matter of genome or even culture, now it is mainly a matter of how technology modify the evolutionary processes and even Earth System directly (i.e., Climate Change or Ozone Layer Depletion). Then, in order to fully understand the current planetary crisis and make good decisions about how to respond to it, we must be aware of this new extra and key dimension. In our framework, this will lead to a special kind of Ecobiont that captures the existence of human societies extreme coupled with technology. Considering that Burger et al. (2017) have shown that Homo Sapiens living in modern cities follow extra-metabolic energy scaling every other mammal do-follow, including hunter-gatherers that we called Classical Homo Sapiens (CHS), we proposed that those Homo Sapiens living in modern cities are in fact a different type of Ecobiont compared with CHS, we called them: Technobionts (López-Corona et al., 2019). This new (in geological time) Ecobiont type has turned itself into a dynamic driver for earth functioning that has overwhelmed the great forces of nature (Steffen et al., 2007).
Because of the above, here we propose that the Anthropocene new geological era, that is about to get formal recognition, is not the concept we need. For thousands of years, CHS co-existed with the rest of the Earth system’s components (biotic and abiotic), so the ongoing Climate or Biodiversity (Dirzo et al., 2014). Crisis are not caused by our human (Anthropic) nature but by an over coupling with some kinds of technologies that enhance unprecedented niche construction capacities. We consider that Technocene responds to the correct source of our current planetary crisis and point out to the proper path, not stop being humans or accepting the catastrophe as Anthropocene would imply, but to find configurations of technologies that take us back to the CHS track as possible, and away from tipping points that could transform the Earth System in an irreversible way (Steffen et al., 2018).
Precautionary Approaches to the Technocene
For example, in terms of Anthropocene that does not explicitly acknowledge the current key role of technology but only its human origin, a solution to Planetary Crisis may be searched into the technology itself in some sort of red queen process, as not identified as an important component of the problem. This would be similar to trying to resolve antibiotic bacteria resistance problems only by looking for better antibiotics (technological focus) without understanding that abuse in the use of antibiotics (technology) is a big part of the problem. Focusing too much on technological solutions may get us into a never-ending circle of problems made by abuse of technology that is meant to be fixed by using more technology that would lead to new problems (maybe even worst problems). In particular, there has been recent attention to the Big Solutions approach in terms of for example geoengineering, which is regarded by advocates as a creative and responsible technological option in the face of a Climate Crisis (Thiele, 2019). Nevertheless, these calls for emergency geoengineering need to be analyzed with extreme care in a full interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary manner (Blackstock and Low, 2018) because this kind of re-coupling with new unproven technologies could carry out hidden systemic risk, so Precautionary Principle (PP) should prevail (Taleb et al., 2014). On the other hand, a Technocene perspective could certainly promote technology de-coupling or at least a higher level of technology selection, promoting less invasive ones. For example, in terms of Climate Crisis society could embrace voluntary resignation to certain types of energy use to match sustainable energy budgets like the one promoted by MacKay (2008).
Planetary changes have occurred several times on Earth System, modeling not only its dynamics but also life evolution. Consider the profound impact to Earth System dynamics that came from the emergence of the 3,700-mile planetary scar we know as the East African Rift Valley some eons ago, or how about some 4 million years ago, grasslands began to replace thick forests, and a dramatic pattern emerged in which our ancestors adapted to the unstable environment by the increasingly inventive use of technology and enhanced social cooperation (Dartnell, 2019). Because normally these changes take very long periods, we tend to ignore them from the human perspective, but when talking about planetary-scale technologies these changes could take only a few years.
So, should we be concerned about, for example, the results by Lei et al. (2019) who have shown a suggesting chain of evidence that both ML5.7 and ML5.3 earthquakes from 2018 in Sichuan Province China were induced by nearby Hydraulic Fracking activities? Nevertheless, although these new technologies as fracking should be considered under very high scrutiny, some “old” technologies such as hydraulic engineering, has already proved to have the potential of drive mayor ecosystemic changes. In fact, Williams et al. (2014) identify “Humans as the third evolutionary stage of biosphere engineering of rivers.” For the authors, the first two bio-engineering forces are oxygenic photosynthesis and the development of vascular plants with root systems. Then in third place comes human activities such as drainage, agriculture, the construction of artificial water bodies, the development of artificial water storage and flow regulation structures, and some second-order effects as changes in global-scale chemical and biogeochemical modification of terrestrial water bodies (Meybeck, 2003).
Sometimes even small and apparently innocuous technology can add up to produce huge effects, which is the case of human use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) often used in aerosol cans and cooling devices such as fridges, that was demonstrated was the driver of Ozone layer depletion. Discovered using 20 years of ozone levels measurements over the Antarctic stations of Halley and Faraday by Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jonathan Shanklin, it was published in a foundational paper of 1985 that transformed the fields of atmospheric science and chemical kinetics and led to global changes in environmental policy (Farman et al., 1985; Solomon, 2019). Even “green” technologies could lead to important planetary changes if implemented massively (Kleidon, 2016) as could happen with Eolic energy production that at the end of the day extract kinetic energy out of climatic systems, “Large-scale exploitation of wind energy will inevitably leave an imprint in the atmosphere” (Buchanan, 2011, p. 9).
Remarks
In that sense, potential awareness induced by recognizing over technological coupling in Technocene or Technobiont concepts could lead to a more precautionary use of some technologies. The Technocene concept is well-grounded into evolutionary and Earth System Dynamics theories, poses a better set mind for decision making and bottom line, we sure cannot stop being Anthropos but we may certainly stop being Technobionts. A word of warning here, by no means we are proposing to neglect scientific or technological progress, nor we are thinking we should live as hunter-gatherers. We are merely saying that we need to take technological coupling into account when trying to understand Earth System Dynamics and that some types and intensities of technological coupling should be treated with the maximum application of the non-naive (this is key for not falling into misunderstanding) Precautionary Principle.
As pointed out by Taleb et al. (2014, p. 2), “a non-naive view of the precautionary principle is one in which it is only invoked when necessary, and only to prevent a certain variety of very precisely defined risks based on distinctive probabilistic structures. But, also, in such a view, the PP should never be omitted when needed.” For example, in small quantities even controversial technologies as nuclear plants which we know may be prone to catastrophic accidents (Perrow, 1984) don’t require to invoke PP. What Charles Perrow notice after his analysis of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 is that normal or systemic accidents, often catastrophic, are mainly inevitable in extremely complex systems like nuclear power plants. Nevertheless, even when terrible, the effects of one nuclear plant accident, don’t propagate to other nuclear plants and most of the worst damage is local.
In this sense, although it is known that the potential harm due to not only accidents as radiation release or core meltdowns but also by radioactive waste can be large. At the same time, the nature of these risks has been extensively studied, and the risks from local uses of nuclear energy have a scale that is much smaller than global (Taleb et al., 2014). On the other hand, we have geoengineering, an unproven new technology whose potential effects are clearly of a planetary scale and for which we don’t have any understanding of direct or indirect risks. Then, to make it very clear, our approach for the use of the Technocene term is not to limit, reject or demonize technology per se, but to promote awareness to only some type of technologies depending on their use, type of risk, scale and coupling with other Earth Systems compartments. Very similar to the idea of incorporating the defaunation concept and not only use the established loss of biodiversity. In addition, and maybe a more important perspective is that thinking of Technocene rather than Anthropocene, also opens debate and analysis of philosophical (ontological, ethical), political and social problems about Climate Change and other components of Planetary Crisis, enhancing a deeper integral understanding of it.
Finally, beyond this conclusion around Planetary Crisis and decision making, we consider that Technocene framework highlights the importance of co-evolutionary processes driven not only by natural selection but also niche construction, turning attention to a topic that has not received enough consideration, the great technological acceleration of the past 50 years, and how it has become an Earth System dynamics changer.
It also points to some very interesting theoretical possibilities because bottom line, it might be interpreted as a contextual statistical perspective of Earth System dynamics. Statistical contextually was developed mainly by Khrennikov (2009) as a modification of classical Kolmogorovian probability, that works as a formal framework for systems that are so context-dependent (coupled) that they should not be addressed separated but by an indivisible pair (system, context). In this sense, what we are suggesting is that because the potential planetary impacts modern human societies (over coupled with some technologies) have, any Earth System dynamics description is incomplete without the human technological context.
Author Contributions
Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
Funding
This work was supported by the CONACyT fund M0037-2018-07, Number 296842, Cátedras CONACyT fellowship program (Project Number 30), and Sistema Nacional de Investigadores SNI, number 62929.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Citation: López-Corona O and Magallanes-Guijón G (2020) It Is Not an Anthropocene; It Is Really the Technocene: Names Matter in Decision Making Under Planetary Crisis. Front. Ecol. Evol. 8:214. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2020.00214
Received: 12 March 2020; Accepted: 08 June 2020; Published: 30 June 2020.
Edited by:Melissa Susan Roth, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Reviewed by:Jason Groves, University of Washington, United States Hannah Fair, Brunel University London, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
This article describes an environmental crisis in Iran that is actually a multidimensional crisis of law and policy. The article explores the restorative nodal governance response to such polycentric problems by weaving together five related ideas originating from criminologist and regulatory scholar Clifford Shearing: nodal governance; regulatory culture as a storybook (rather than a rulebook); justice as a better future; networked discovery of Awareness, Motivation, and Pathways for transformation; and a green ethic of care to guide transformation. We use an imaginary of a river to learn from a confluence of these ideas. They involve nodes of local governance organized by front-line workers who restoried intertwined problems with an ethic of care. The challenge uncovered is that restorative microstrategies proved promising when steering powerless actors, but frayed when faced with factory owners. More aggressive strategies of nodal governance may bring forth more responsive escalation in order to confront privilege. Yet such strategies might be more creatively escalated as nodes of conversational regulation that reconfigure Shearing’s five insights to transform landscapes of power. A coherence discovered inductively across these insights revolves around restorative nodal contestation of hegemony. Even lives as infused with domination as those found along the Kashaf River in Iran, where our case study is set, can be restored in counterhegemonic ways.
1 INTRODUCTION
Desertification, climate change, and water pollution drive environmental collapse along Iran’s once mighty Kashaf River. The river’s boundaries contain a concentrated nest of intertwined crises, including urban squatting, drug abuse, crime, poor public health, marginalization, and ecological destruction. Coupled with constraints on state and urban planning and underfunded public health, these crises present growing threats to the legitimacy and survival of the state itself. We examine how this seemingly unpromising context offers insights into a better future, and how it achieves this by uncovering the restorative potential of restorying old ways of framing both problems and solutions.
This article is not a study of the global south as “primarily a place of parochial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2016, p. 14). Instead, we argue that the more extreme environmental and geopolitical pressures from markets that Iran faces can help the West comprehend the nested crises of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the era of human domination/destruction of Earth systems. Nested ecological and economic threats to the legitimacy and survival of the state could provide insight, transposing the Comaroffs, on “How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Iran.” It remains to be seen how either Iran or Euro-America will evolve as threats shuttle between the everyday and the epic in future crisis management.
We bring together diverse strands of decades of scholarship by the South African criminologist and regulatory scholar Clifford Shearing. Some of Shearing’s influence on our article flows not directly from his academic pieces but from his character as a conversational colleague who seeds ideas into the work of others by posing both micro questions, such as on mediation of conflict, and macro questions, such as on species extinction in the Anthropocene. This article instantiates that influence. We show how in the confluence of his different streams of ideas, there lies a holistic vision of ways to understand and address complex problems. This new conceptualization of nodal environmental restoration arose through our case study of a polycentric restorative response to crisis in Mashad, a major city situated in North/Central Iran and through which the Kashaf River flows.
The case study reveals how the sheer scale and scope of the crisis has meant that the usual regulatory failures of risk-shifting, heavy-handed targeting of crisis victims, corruption, capture, regulatory ritualism, and legitimation crises did not signal an unsatisfying end to the story. Rather, what emerged was a restorative response, mobilized largely through one of Mashad’s prosecutor’s offices, that gradually expanded the variety and agency of those involved in their roles as victims, offenders, and regulators. We articulate the ways in which this restorative response is best understood through drawing upon five streams of Shearing’s scholarship, cohering the ongoing challenges of reconfiguring landscapes of inequality. These five streams are: nodal governance; regulatory culture as a storybook (rather than a rulebook); justice as a better future; networked discovery of Awareness, Motivation, and Pathways (AMP) for transformation; and a green ethic of care to guide transformation.
Critically, we show how addressing macroscale problems such as climate change and large-scale corporate pollution can be productively entangled with the restoried restorative approach used at a micro level to steer powerless actors away from harmful conduct. This potential points to an ecological restorative approach to environmental harm. This approach is able to illuminate the interconnections between justice at many scales and to evoke new imaginaries out of interconnected crises.
We offer the entire Kashaf River narrative as one that “walks” with non-Western scholars and thinkers (and practitioners and activists) from whom we can learn and “co-produce new responses to the Anthropocene challenge” (Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 138). The Kashaf River prosecutors set aside prosecutors’ usual construction of reality, namely that their job responds to illegality with proportionality of force under the rule of law. They restoried this script to instead display an ethic of care toward marginalized people trapped in an ecological vortex by aiming for “justice as a better future” (Froestad & Shearing, 2012).
We structure this article as follows. First, we outline five of Shearing’s contributions that serve as our analytical focus. Part 2 then narrates the unfolding layers of crisis that Shearing’s five insights help us to see. Third, we demonstrate how these five insights enable us to reframe different layers of regulatory failure across a span of several decades. The fourth section identifies particularly decisive moments of transformation of the regulatory storybook for the Kashaf River. This transformation grew significantly from the nodal leadership of a prosecutor’s office, which contributed to a new restorative narrative grounded in the enduring traditions of mediation in both Persian society and Islam.1 The limits of this transformation’s accomplishments are documented, as well as its restorative promise. In particular, we describe how restorative approaches adopted by less empowered members of society that appear to work in averting their acts of environmental harm can be resisted by elites. More optimistically, we point to how the momentum for transformation established through iterative restorative approaches can reach outwards and upwards to diverse sources of power. Drawing decision makers and impacted but less empowered parties into restorative circles can bolster the momentum needed to make headway against even powerful local actors.
2 BACKGROUND AND METHODS: ITERATIVE SURFACING
By way of background, both the research findings and Shearing’s theoretical relevance were serendipitous. In 2016, Braithwaite went on a speaking tour of a dozen cities in Iran. After asking to visit places in which innovative justice work was being done, Braithwaite was introduced to the creative Kashaf River restorative work discussed herein. This was a centerpiece of the Mashad visit led by Hojabrosadati. There was no intent to target this site or test Shearing’s theories. Restorative nodal governance of this river just happened to surface as the most intellectually engaging of the diverse restorative innovations discovered across Iran. One reason it excited the authors lay in how it revealed the relevance of Shearing’s seemingly diverse insights and inductively revealed ways in which they were interconnected and coherent that were not made apparent in previous research (not even by Shearing himself, who commented that his insights were “implicit rather than explicit”2 in reference to previous sites of less complex intersections of crisis than the Kashaf River). Hojabrosadati and Braithwaite joined a second fieldwork trip to the Kashaf River in 2017. Forsyth joined Hojabrosadati for the third field visit in 2018. A fourth round of fieldwork was completed by Hojabrosadati alone in 2018–2019.
The data were derived from observations, as well as from opportunities to ask questions at stakeholder meetings, including one long meeting involving 20 Mashad judges and prosecutors, along with 38 other interviews with 51 respondents. Those interviewed included prosecutors, judges, mediators, volunteers, religious leaders, employees of environmental NGOs, managers and inspectors of regulatory agencies, businesspeople, and people of the Kashaf River. Selection for the first wave of interviewees was serendipitous; for the next three waves, selection was aimed at interviewing the most nodally significant or revelatory actors. In addition, 51 official media reports, 39 reports from underground media, several dozen Persian language publications, and confidential research reports on pollution levels, including government reports, were accessed, reviewed, and included in our document analysis.
3 PART 1. A RESTORATIVE NODAL GOVERNANCE APPROACH TO TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES OF POWER: FIVE INTEGRATED SHEARING INSIGHTS
This section explores the five insights from Clifford Shearing’s work that animate this article, showing how microdynamics might foster macrolevel transformation of interconnected crises.3 The five insights or ideas that we draw out from Shearing’s work are:
Nodal governance;
Regulatory culture as storybook;
Justice as a better future;
Awareness, Motivation, Pathways; and
Security and entanglements in the Anthropocene.
3.1 Nodal governance
Nodal governance (Burris et al., 2005; Johnston & Shearing, 2003; Shearing, 2001; Shearing & Wood, 2003; Wood & Shearing, 2013) draws on Foucault’s (1990, 93) dictum that “power comes from everywhere.” Hence, power can be drawn from across networks that are pulled together at nodes of coordination. Nodes are simply points where flows of power intersect. A node is a site where knowledge, capacity, and resources are mobilized to steer the flow of events (Burris et al., 2005). Nodes of governance restory mentalities (ways of thinking) about governance. In the case study, we conceive of the prosecutor’s office in the Kashaf River case as a node that scaled up governance to address a multilevel problem. At the same time, it told the story of a response to crisis that took the form of care and engagement rather than punishment and domination.
3.2 Regulatory culture as a storybook
Nodal governance has the ability to restory mentalities of governance. This insight has its origins in Shearing and Ericson’s (1991) analysis of police culture not as a rulebook, but as a storybook. Somewhat akin to universities, police agencies, too, have volumes of policies and procedures for most problems their agents are likely to confront. While useful as guidance in difficult situations, it is likely that many busy police officers and academics rarely read these volumes in their entirety or have only a dim awareness of their contents as they perform their daily work. A fallacious belief often held by management is that the way to change such organizations is to change the rulebook. The Shearing and Ericson storybook insight reveals that to transform organizations in ways that gain traction, you must change their storybook—the stories they tell one another in the lunchroom, in the patrol car, or on the beat. Mentalities are formed through this storytelling. So are imaginaries for creative and lateral ways of solving practical work problems. In the case study, this storytelling insight is reflected in how Shari’a stories and principles allowed Prosecutor Mohebi’s office to replace bulldozers with a restorative legal imaginary.
3.3 Justice as a better future
Shearing and Braithwaite have long talked about the idea of “justice as a better future,” going back to at least the time of Braithwaite’s visit to Shearing’s Zwelathemba project in the late 1990s. Shearing, together with Jan Froestad, found empirically that what members of Zwelathemba’s South African “PeaceMaking Gatherings” wanted more than other forms of justice was justice that would “make for a better tomorrow” (Froestad & Shearing, 2007). This confirmed Braithwaite’s observations of Shearing’s South African fieldwork sites. This bottom-up Southern vision was an inspiring one. Froestad, along with Shearing, further contributed invaluable documentation and analysis of the Zwelethemba model of forward-looking justice through peace (Froestad & Shearing, 2012, following up on Froestad & Shearing, 2007). Each of these contributions has informed our conceptualization of this third insight.
The degree to which the Zwelethemba conception of justice should or should not be seen as having a family resemblance to restorative justice occupies the interest of many scholars, including Froestad and Shearing (2007). Resolving this is not so important to our analysis here, for reasons made evident in the following example. Prosecutors who were key catalysts of restorying the Kashaf River intervention strategy continued overwhelmingly to be practitioners of backward-looking punitive criminal prosecution with little resemblance to restorative justice. Yet, when it came to the Kashaf River, the problem was so deep, its layers so complex and challenging, that the prosecutors flipped to a forward-looking restorying of the kind of justice that was needed to make a better future. In the process, they happened to conceive of this shift to some degree in restorative terms, to some degree in Islamic terms, and to some degree in traditional Iranian terms (at least implicitly). What is fundamental to our analysis, however, is the overarching idea that for Security in the Anthropocene (Harrington & Shearing, 2017), fiddling with backward-looking justice while the planet burns is a poor choice compared to a choice made in favor of governance toward a better future. In this multiscale and multitemporal circumstance, as opposed to a more mundane legal circumstance like theft, “How do we make a better tomorrow?” (Froestad & Shearing, 2007) became a more inescapable question.
3.4 Awareness, Motivation, Pathways
Under this heading, we consider the Shearing idea of transformation as requiring wide circuits of conversation across civil society and multiple levels of governance to constitute AMP to transformation. Honig et al. (2015) developed the AMP framework from African cases of environmental threats. Their inductive empirical insight was that interventions aimed at protecting the environment commonly succeeded in building Awareness but then failed to improve environmental outcomes, because Motivation or Pathways were missing. Or, Awareness and Motivation were both accomplished, but actors could not imagine and lay down a workable Pathway to effect change. Awareness in Honig et al. (2015) is given a broad Shearingesque meaning to include altered mentalities and capacities to reframe. This is AMP’s link to Shearing’s restorying idea. Motivations could take the form of an intrinsic love of nature, or extrinsic payoffs. Pathways means courses to action. Opening up opportunity structures can require resources and unlocking the skill-sets of Aware and Motivated individuals.
3.5 Security and entanglements in the Anthropocene
Finally, we consider the idea of a reconfigured ethic of care for the Anthropocene. This ethic of care provides one overarching integration within which nestle the other four ideas. This line of thought is explicit in Harrington and Shearing (2017), but it evolves from earlier work (for example, Shearing et al., 2013). For Harrington and Shearing (2017, p. 115), Security in the Anthropocene requires acknowledgement of “our careless failures to recognize our entanglements.” This means reckless entanglements of humans with ecosystems and their human and non-human inhabitants. Harrington and Shearing see a green ethic of care—one that “emphasizes the relational practices that underpin the survival and flourishing of life” (2017, p. 117)—as the remedy.
As our discussion will show, such a recognition of carelessness with nature and with the marginalized people who suffer the most from its degradation, as well as engagement with an ethic of care, was evident in the restoried restorative approach of the Mashad prosecutors, mediators, and the network of support they mobilized. After decades of punitive responses toward the marginalized, combined with captured impunity for the well-connected, this restorative and responsive transformation began to realize the Harrington and Shearing (2017, p. 111) ideal that “[r]esponsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other” (see also Hong & You, 2018). The transformation was nodal, drawing sustenance from indigenous philosophies [of the imams, graybeards, and grayhairs discussed below] that “emphasize different relational ontologies and cosmologies” (Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 116). The volunteers working in the prosecutor’s office who put their own money toward victim support exemplified the supplanting of punitiveness with a spirit of empathy in order “to engage in gift-giving and to feel gratitude in the midst of ongoing, seemingly perpetual, social, and ecological crises” (Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 127). Volunteers were not the only gift-giving actors involved in this multiplex problem-solving endeavor. A recent example of this approach by one prosecutor is an initiative to deal with the problem of illegal alcohol and drug factories located far from the city hub. Recognizing that regular patrols of the area would be too costly, after knocking down the illegal buildings, the government planted barberries and other traditional plants used in Iranian cuisine. The intention was to revegetate the area, connect city dwellers with traditional Iranian harvesting rituals, and also ensure the regular passage of passersby in order to disrupt any attempted re-establishment of the illegal stills and meth factories.
In sum, what the Shearing insights are pointing us to is the importance and possibility of moving from the “business as usual” conceptions of governance and power as solid, homogenous and fixed, to a framing that is far more liquid and diffuse. Rather than seeing governance as bound within a state, we see it as existing everywhere. Rather than seeing rules as the only source of ruling, we recognize the regulatory power of stories and imagination to govern as well. Rather than conceiving of justice as producing a particular result, a concept of justice that is encompassed by striving for “a better tomorrow” is opened up to all. The concept of the Anthropocene points us toward the realization, long understood by Indigenous peoples around the globe, that complex problems, including those concerning the environment, require liquid governance responses. Liquid governance responses embody organic, living responsiveness to the complex patterning of power and the ways in which power produces both landscapes of inequality and equality. The AMP model shows us one way to move from a solid to a liquid approach that targets multi-level, multi-sited regulatory problems; we explore this transition in the extended case study of the Kashaf River below.
In the rest of this article, we use the term “restorative nodal governance” as a shorthand for this confluence of Shearing insights. Below, and especially in the last section, we draw out the theoretical insights and opportunities for the new forms of praxis they engender, and particularly for the way they can advance Mouffe’s (2013) approach to pluralist contestation of landscapes of inequality. While we focus primarily upon the coherence of restorative nodal governance for human survival in the Anthropocene, this all-encompassing survival pressure is rooted in tackling more tractable challenges nodally and restoratively by, for instance, finding homes for squatters, improving food safety, implementing less violent police practices, and finding alternative employment pathways for sex workers. We will show how marginalized people learned to take a restorative approach to managing problems of more immediate and practical concern to them, and how this catalyzed restorative nodal governance, which in turn helped teach factory owners (albeit with partial success) to be more restorative and responsive to ecological injustice.
In his comment on this article, Shearing conceived of its accomplishment as being to:
uncover an underlying unity that integrates [the five] themes. This unity arises from a recognition that these hitherto siloed themes arise out of, and reflect, a pervasive underlying theoretical agenda focused on understanding landscapes of power and the structural inequalities they produce.4
4 PART 2: LAYERS OF CRISIS AND LEVELS OF GOVERNANCE
Here we document the pollution crisis of the Kashad River and its intersection with larger crises of regional water depletion and global warming. The river is drying up and suffering from catastrophic heavy metal pollution (Sheikh et al., 2013). This proves to be not only an environmental challenge, but also socially and politically complex. Its gradual demise has played out against the background of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in an Iran that has been increasingly cut off from, and sanctioned by, the rest of the world as it has transformed into a messianic Shari’a law state.
Over time, Mashad city’s social “residuum” (Stedman-Jones, 1971)—superfluous people who received no benefit from any rising tide of economic development (particularly the homeless, but also drug addicts, sex workers, and desperate unemployed squatters)—was shifted away from the gaze of respectable citizens and pilgrims. They were forced to squat outside of town near the Kashad River’s edge. The Shearingesque storying of the river in our interviews reveals a narrative in which environmental pressure shifted marginal farmers who could no longer afford to buy arable land or pay for irrigation, leaving them with no other choice than to squat beside the Kashaf River alongside its other beleaguered squatters. In order to continue farming, they irrigate illegally, either from the river or from the effluent pipes and drains from factories that empty into it. At another level, this is also a story of shifting marginal, polluting factories, such as tanneries and carpet washing, out of the city to a river that shifts pollution downstream. These marginal factories provided marginal employment for the marginal residuum pushed riverside. Big business then awoke to the advantages of locating in a vicinity with low environmental expectations (at least initially). Each shift in use made the river’s problems more complex and more intractable. Later, state help to treat effluent after it left their plants amplified the attraction for big business; crisis attracted business subsidies. So this is a story of the interactions among an urban social residuum, a rural residuum, and industrial residue in a single dumping ground. Many intertwined problems thus came to be seen by elites as posing a social stability threat, even to the state itself.
In Part 3, we will identify recurring themes of the regulatory literature that appear as the story unfolds. Yet the problems remain; the wider dimensions of crisis get frighteningly worse, although some real progress is made in the interstices of state governance. Facing worsening environmental and underclass calamities, we find Mashad, Iran to be an unlikely locale for incipient progress toward confronting crises of the Anthropocene. Before we can examine this aspect, however, we first unpack the layers acting as the catalyst for crisis.
4.1 Layers of a multi-layered problem
4.1.1 Climate change
Global warming has gradually increased evaporation from an already-parched Iran. More water evaporates from Iran’s tributaries, with the resulting clouds producing rain elsewhere. Climate change has meant that less snowmelt feeds the flow into the Kashaf River (Qanbarzadeh & Jafarpour, 2004, p. 64). Less snow means reduced underground water inputs, causing wells to dry up—wells that were once 25 meters deep are now dug 200 meters to reach the water table (Interview 041710). Climate change is the structural context that exacerbates all the crises that follow.
4.1.2 Urban squatters
Urban planning policies in the late decades of the twentieth century effectively drove large numbers of squatters out of Iran’s second most populous city, Mashad, to the banks of the Kashaf River. Methods used to drive out squatters included cutting off municipal services and mobilizing police to dismantle their dwellings. Squatters were seen as a threat to urban amenity and to the lifestyle, safety, and property values of middle and upper class citizens. A tourism hub, Mashad attracts 20 million pilgrims annually to its immensely beautiful Holy Shrine (Saghaei & Javanbakht, 2013, p. 79). Elites are keen to keep the city clean and presentable for these tourists. Mashad’s massive slums have been proliferating for decades as sites of inequality (Hoad, 2018). An important early contributor to the Kashaf River crisis in the 1980s was the release of raw sewerage and household waste from squatter settlements into the river (ISNA, 2017). In part, this was what destroyed the livelihoods of those who once fished the river, in combination with global warming drying up its flow. The poverty of squatters was exacerbated by health impacts on their children, who played in polluted, sometimes malaria-infested ponds that had once been clean parts of the river. Some of these ponds were created by their forebears diverting water from the river (Alizadeh et al., 1990, pp. 93–97).
4.1.3 Marginal farmers
Simultaneously, rural families dispossessed by drought, population pressures on remaining arable land, and a plummeting water table headed to cities like Mashad in search of work. As squatting opportunities in the city dwindled, squatting outside on the banks of the Kashaf River, using its water and wells to grow fruit, vegetables, wheat, and livestock for the urban market, became attractive for displaced farmers (Eshqi & Servati, 2003, pp. 150–157).
4.1.4 Crime, drug addicts/dealers, sex workers
Urban police were attracted to reducing crime on their beat by using the same planning pressure applied to urban squatters to also drive out the drug addicts and street dealers who were not integrated into organized crime groups with which the police felt they could work. They applied these tactics to sex workers as well, especially those from the squatting class who plied their trade on the streets, as opposed to sex work tucked away inside more elegant premises under the wing of organized crime groups. These were the push factors; the pull factor was that for decades, criminals had become increasingly attracted to the Kashaf River squatter settlements because it remained a large, unregulated space, with no police station until 2014. For example, semi-organized car theft gangs in the city would often bring stolen vehicles back to their bases in riverbank areas.
These different layers of the problem—the urban squatter class layer, marginalized farmers, and the criminal class—were intertwined. Marginal factories would go on to form yet another layer that became interwined with these existing layers.
4.1.5 Marginal factories
Environmental regulation in Mashad increased the attraction of the initially unregulated space of the Kashaf River squatter settlements for economically marginal industries that craved the kind of cheap labor that the desperately under-employed poor of the Kashaf River settlement could supply, such as carpet washing and oppressive metallurgy work like plating. Tanneries built on the banks of the river created unhealthy working conditions, and the tanning process used chemical inputs (notably chromium) that for many years ran directly into the river. While more recent environmental reforms are now improving regulation of this problem, the Iranian leather industry is huge in terms of both output and footprint: few places have more gifted masters of leathercraft than Iran.
Environmental risk shifting to the Kashaf River is more global than simply a matter of how environmental regulation works in Iran. It is also a function of how it works across Europe, where tanneries have largely disappeared. European markets rely on leather imports from places like the Kashaf River because the costs of protecting workers and rivers from chromium and other risks make profitable EU production difficult. It was alleged in interviews with regulators that tanneries in “leather city” had sold water polluted with chromium to farmers alongside the Kashaf River. One theme in Shearing’s work on the geo-economics of the Anthropocene is how dominant metropoles shift crises to more marginal spaces, onto the backs of more marginalized people, and onto endangered species. We have seen that these strands of Shearing’s oeuvre are structurally conditioned by climate change, such that the river is initially attractive to the residuum, who then decimate it as they work for globally marginalized capital, only to experience over time the progressive evaporation of the river that originally attracted them.
Not all of the marginal industries that moved to the Kashaf River were heavy polluters through products like leather and cement. One environmentally friendly industry involved low-tech recycling and reprocessing plants that recycled products like plastic in a labor-intensive way, cashing in on the large supply of cheap labor by the river. One waste separation plant that has now moved inland from the river to the large, state-planned, industrial estate of Tous (see Figure 1) employs 1000 women as waste separators. Many are former sex workers who are given a path to an alternative livelihood through this work as part of a set of newer, more restorative strategies for tackling the locale’s intertwined crises (Interview 041707). While former sex workers get low-skilled recycling work here, they are also provided with vocational training, which is reflective of a transition to a “justice as a better future” vision of local capacity-building (Froestad & Shearing, 2007). Traditional weaving is a popular choice for these vocational transitions. It reconnects women to rich Persian, Turkmen, or Afghan craft traditions that are popular with tourists and locals alike.
FIGURE 1 Map of Mashad
4.1.6 Big factories
Our research discovered that most of today’s pollution is not caused by high-impact small businesses but by the larger factories that came later to the district (Interviews 081703; 091701-8). The scale of the factory problem is huge, with the area containing 230 factories of almost every kind known to industrial capitalism, plus many smaller plants that make a contribution to pollution, all located along a 45-kilometer stretch of the river in the vicinity of Mashad. While most of the factories are small and marginal, a good many now are large: one has 12,000 workers, the kind of factory almost impossible to find in the West today. The scale of pollution can also be large, as in one recent case where it was alleged, thanks to the undercover monitoring of environmental NGOs, that 300–600 tanker loads of polluted waste had been dumped into the river in a single night (Interview 041709). Shocking photographic evidence of this dumping from trucks was shown to us.
Slightly back from the river, Tous has expanded to become the largest industrial area in the region. Cobalt, sodium, zinc, and lead are among the pollutants its factories spew into the river and the underground water supply. Forty different problem pollutants have been identified in the river. Well-connected factory owners have received state authorization for their polluting factories, and over time this has become the biggest part of the problem.
The scale of factory growth over the past 30 years has expanded the population in the vicinity of the river significantly, such that 300,000–400,000 people now reside in a marginalized city at the margins of the metropolis. Factories owned by economically weak operators struggle to comply with environmental laws and cannot obtain licenses from the state. Although these factories enjoy neither a state license nor a social license from a Mashad community incensed by the environmental crisis, the state is reluctant to close them for fear of rioting by their marginalized employees and fear that organized criminals might push out current owners, making the regulatory crisis even more intractable.
5 PART 3. LAYERS OF EARLY REGULATORY FAILURE
Early responses to the regulatory crises of the Kashaf River evoked classic pathologies repeatedly documented in the regulatory literature. The following sections address both these responses and relevant topics from the literature: the greater political appeal of risk shifting over risk management; regulatory ritualism; persistent resilience of vested interests in environmental harm; corruption; capture; a legitimation crisis; and the challenges of coordinating multilevel governance to make a response work.
5.1 Risk shifting with illegal wells
A prominent theme in the literature on the roots of the 2008 global financial crisis is the danger of moving from managing risks to risk shifting, as Western banks did in the 2000s by slicing and dicing high risk loans, then selling them as securities (Lewis, 2011). This was an alternative to managing the risks of their bad loans, as they had done in the past. We have seen already that the Kashaf River crisis was fundamentally about structures of inequality that shifted risks posed by marginalized people and marginal industries to the river’s edge rather than managing those risks in place. In the end, risks displaced to an unregulated space created even bigger risks, ones that ultimately threaten the Earth system and the legitimacy of the state.
We have not yet described, however, one of the most environmentally disastrous of these risks. In the under-regulated spaces along the river, countless poor farmers, as well as wealthy people and factories craving water, dug illegal wells. Iran has an environmental imperative to close these illegal wells; they use water wastefully, driving the water table ever deeper and widening domains of desertification. Iran’s courts have seen thousands of enforcement actions to seal illegal wells. These cases are a massive part of the workload of the national courts, and by 2015, the courts had enforced the closure of 2300 illegal wells. While this seems to be and is a huge enforcement workload, green NGOs argue that there are 500,000 illegal wells in Iran (Interview 041708). The NGOs that we interviewed—including Water Saviour Population, Sound of Water Association, Water Lovers, and Water Protectors—want a total ban on all new wells and the mass closure of existing wells, in order to facilitate the recycling of all water under public regulatory control.
In response to such court cases, farmers have been driven to move dozens of kilometers downriver in order to establish new farm settlements and dig new illegal wells. This, combined with failures to close most old wells because of enforcement overload and corruption, means that the risk-shifting dynamic has made Iran’s water crisis worse rather than better.
The Mashad reach of the Kashaf River is at the base of a large bowl, so water (and pollutants) that run into the river here find their way into the groundwater. At one level, there was progress when the massive newer industrial city of Tous drew factories away from the river. At another level, Tous became a new attractor of unsightly factories that the city did not want downtown; at the same time, it attracted them to a site that endangered the groundwater system because Tous is still close to Mashad and to the once-great river. This makes Tous far from an ideal location for an industrial estate. Hence, at a structural level, the creation of Tous as an industrial city was still an instance of risk-shifting, rather than one of optimal environmental risk management.
5.2 Heavy-handed targeting of crisis victims
Over time, the risk shifting that created concentrations of drug dealers and other semi-organized criminals outside the city created opportunity structures for new kinds of crime. Eventually, this clustering came back to bite respectable Mashad society, through, for example, the emergence of gangs that stole expensive cars. This aspect of the riverbank’s nest of problems worsened as the city limits expanded toward the squatter settlements. Also noticeable to respectable society was the fact that the beautiful Kashaf River, once attractive for boating and fishing, was now devastated.
At this point in the story, the very forces of urban planning law that had helped create the squatter settlements in 1992 again arrived on the scene to newly oppress the marginalized. Courts issued orders to move houses and farms back from the river. Police moved in to protect bulldozers executing the court orders. Squatters were bludgeoned and bulldozed away from riverbank areas. They resisted the police, trying to stay in their homes. When police shot a 12-year-old student, the dispossessed rioted. They marched on May 30, 1992, to the center of Mashad,burning down police headquarters and the city headquarters of at least two major banks, among other buildings. In total, perhaps 15 buildings in total were burned down during the rioting (Interview 041709), and six people were killed (Hashemi Rafsanjani, 2016, pp. 89–113; Orlando Sentinel, 1992). The Iranian state continues to fear that uprisings like this might spread popular discontent across the country (Interview 041706). Mashad has become one critical focus of that fear: a 2017 cascade of popular protests against the regime that spread across many cities began in Mashad (BBC, 2017). The “crowd in history” (Rudé, 1964), with its revolutionary sentiment on the streets, has been a major factor in recent and ancient Iranian political history. Below, we show how this fear of the crowd in history and of the residuum (Stedman-Jones, 1971) created space for the justice system to propose a creative alternative approach to the heavy-handed bulldozing of the marginalized.
5.3 Corruption and capture
There are some public—and many private—documentary sources showing that corruption and regulatory capture by business interests is widespread in the regulation of the multilevel problems of the Kashaf River (see Freedom Messenger, 2016; ISNA, 2016; Tasnim News Agency, 2018). Nearly all those we interviewed said that corruption and capture constituted a problem. Respondents differed only in whether they believed that corruption and capture were root causes of the crisis, or only an occasional problem for some agencies (albeit not their own!) (Interviews 091701, 111702). We were told of instances in which inspectors were diverted from filing negative reports on factory pollution through payments for their children’s weddings, gifts of LCD TVs, or even trips to Dubai.
5.4 Regulatory ritualism
Sealing some illegal wells and then looking the other way as farmers move downriver to dig more is an example of regulatory ritualism as well as risk shifting. Ritualism involves acceptance of institutionalized means for securing regulatory goals while losing all focus on achieving the goals or outcomes themselves (Merton, 1968). Theoretical work on regulatory ritualism owes a debt to Foucault (1977) because so many of the regulatory rituals identified in the empirical work that grounds the theory of regulatory ritualism are rituals of discipline that oppress vulnerable actors (Braithwaite et al., 2007). This ritualism was evident initially along the Kashaf River when the wells of the marginalized, but not the well-connected, were sealed.
The most common forms of ritualism along the river were modalities recurrently documented in the regulatory literature. Front stage, politicians make robust announcements about how they will stick with the problem until it is fixed; back stage, they settle for occasional dramatic legal actions against a few less well-connected law breakers, then walk away from the problem when the media and public attention cycle moves on. Levying slap-on-the-wrist monetary fines for factories has been, and still is, a routine form of ritualism along the Kashaf River. Years later, exactly the same kind of environmental offending by the same factory recurs, and the same kind of slap-on-the-wrist fine is applied again, without escalating regulatory pressure until the problem is fixed (Interview 041709). As discussed further below, in comparison to this ritualistic enforcement, there proved to be more promise in environmental activism for restorative engagement with business, backed by escalation to less ritualistic remedies than small fines, such as closing down factories or moving them away from rivers (Braithwaite et al., 2007).
5.5 Legitimation crisis
Climate change continues to put pressure on Iran’s water table, threatening future waves of drought and ultimately jeopardizing the security of the state. Far beyond Iran, such crises of entangled fragility create “the potential for global-scale political upheaval” (Harrington & Shearing, 2017, p. 141). For Habermas (1975), a legitimation crisis is an identity crisis for citizens that arises when confidence in government administration collapses as a result of interacting subsystems of the administrative apparatus failing to solve the problems for which they were designed. Resilient ritualism is one kind of administrative pathology that can foment a legitimation crisis. Merton’s (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure laid one foundation for Habermas’s conception of a legitimation crisis by showing that the stability of states depends on citizens accepting that public administration uses legitimate means to achieve legitimated goals. For Merton, securing legitimate means but not goals can create a crisis of ritualism. Securing goals without legitimate means can create a crisis of illegitimate innovation. When neither are secured, Merton conceives of this as “rebellion” toward goals and means, with rebels rejecting goals, means, and legitimacy for the entire social order. Crises of confidence in the state arise, according to Habermas, because of contradictory imperatives pursued by different subsystems, such as subsystems for urban planning, industrial planning, banking, water management, policing, and the judiciary, as is happening along the Kashaf River.
The impending risks of a legitimation crisis were made palpable by farmers from the riverside burning banks and police headquarters in the metropolis, as well as by middle class angst about pollution and food safety. In May 2009 (Mehr News, 2009), many fell sick, including the Iranian author of this article, from eating melons irrigated with water polluted by Kashaf River factory effluent. In another incident, two people died after eating mutton from polluted farms along the river (ISNA, 2009).
For Habermas, a legitimation crisis is not one that necessarily brings down a regime, but one that signals a systemically driven state of jeopardy with respect to the capability of the regime to deliver for citizens. The incoherence among regulatory subsystems and the loss of political will created by risk shifting led to a crisis for the state along the Kashaf River. At least, this was true until a surprising node of governance came to the state’s rescue to accomplish coherence and restore political will.
6 PART 4. PARADOXES OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IN MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE
6.1 Layers of governance
A longer SSRN version of this paper (Hojabrosadati et al., 2019) details the role of different levels of environmental governance involved in the Kashaf River: international, national, provincial, city, district, and NGO governance. The international level included help pursuant to the reconciliation of Iran with the European Union as a response to the Iran Nuclear Deal and the lifting of sanctions. The Europeans provided technical assistance to remedy the area’s history of drawing water into production systems, polluting it, then sending it back into the water table through effluent released into the river. Transforming the metabolism of cities, from linear degradation to circular renewal, is fundamental to water re-use assistance (World Future Council, 2010). We saw practical immediate benefits from restoring a river when European and Iranian actors sat around a table of help. This had laid a foundation for restorative integration of Iran into more distant global projects of environmental restoration. Iran signing the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was the most important example of reintegration of Iran relevant to the root causes of the Kashaf River crisis.
Environmental NGOs played a somewhat truncated role because the state must approve the registration of NGOs. A certain degree of circumspection (in raising allegations of regulatory corruption, for example) is required to sustain registration. This means that most NGO applicants are shut down. Even so, environmental NGOs did play constructive roles in the governance of this crisis. It was green NGOs that took the Kashaf River crisis to the press for the first time (Interview 041709) and exposed some of the worst environmental abuses. The new criminal procedure law of 2015 allowed NGOs for the first time to launch criminal actions against corporate offenders. One recent NGO criminal suit alleged that criminal managers in two regulatory agencies failed to implement industrial waste water laws (Khabaronline, 2015; Interviews 111701–111703). Sometimes representatives of environmental NGOs are permitted to accompany state regulatory inspectors on site, although this is far from routine (Interview 041709). The most important environmental NGOs working to save the river are Saviour of Waters, Environmental Lovers of Iran, the Sound of Water Association, Water Lovers, and Water Protectors.
The Mayor of Mashad’s office, an organization it sponsored called Green Space, local branches of the Environment Agency and the Water Agency, urban planning and police agencies, industry associations, local banks who lent favorably to support relocation, and the national Ministry of Environmental Affairs all played nodal governance roles in bringing an end to earlier crude policies, which had simply bulldozed paths to non-solutions (for more on this kind of nodal governance function in the regulatory literature, see Shearing, 2001).
Most evocatively for our theoretical frame, the chief prosecutor’s office of the Judicial Agency in the relevant district played a surprisingly catalytic role as a strategic node of multilevel governance coordination. This role really began when the office responded restoratively to many Mashad firms that had cut corners with the law in order to stay afloat in the face of European sanctions during the early years of this century.
6.2 Paradoxes of restorative justice
Our interviews5 revealed that the prosecutors evolved a surprisingly restorative approach to confronting economic crisis and job losses. They approached some 1000 cases involving 270 factories with a posture of sympathy for executives who had been put in impossible positions after their markets dried up or supply chains were cut due to international sanctions. Mediators from the prosecutor’s office approached banks, for example, to help companies secure extended loans to save jobs while meeting minimum regulatory requirements. In interviews, it was made explicit that factories resuming production was seen as a restorative outcome (Interview 051627). The prosecutor, Bakhshi Mohebi, noted in 2016 that his Mediation Council had resolved 600 cases in a restorative way in 2015. His restorative approach to corporate crime enforcement (Parker, 2004), which made up the bulk of his office’s workload, opened the door to a restorative approach in the Kashaf River environmental cases. Here we conceive of Prosecutor Mohebi’s office not only as a decisively restorative node of governance in Shearing’s sense but also as a node that draws on structurally restorative background features of Shari’a law and Persian culture.
Certain features of Shari’a law are structurally restorative in general (Osanloo, 2020), but particularly in application to corporate law. One is that the needs of victims of crime are temporally privileged, and more privileged in emphasis, than is the case in Western law. Hence in the case of safety, health, and environmental crimes, the needs of a worker who has lost a leg or a fisher who has lost a livelihood as a result of the crime should be remedied first. It is a structurally egalitarian feature of this approach to law that the victim’s story gets the first opportunity to shape the narrative of the case. A corporate prosecution will not proceed until mediations and court hearings have first decided on what support and compensation will be delivered to those victimized by the corporation. This victim support function of the prosecutor is so important that the Mashad prosecutor’s office uses its considerable clout in the Iranian system of governance to call welfare offices, public housing offices, workers’ compensation insurers, state licensing offices, and other government offices to clear logjams that delay the provision of assistance to victims. Volunteer victim supporters at the Mediation Council were unpaid and sometimes provided victims with money out of their own pockets to help them meet desperate needs. These volunteers were widely recognized in our interviews as playing a helpful role in assuring that the criminal process was conducted with justice and dignity.
Islamic principles also infused the approach to bread and butter Kashaf River cases such as those involving farmers who dug illegal wells. Mediators and prosecutors frequently viewed such farmers as both offenders against environmental laws and victims with hungry families. This meant that the restorative doctrine of necessity in Shari’a law applied. This ancient doctrine states clearly that one is permitted to steal if one is starving (Al-Hilali & Khan, 2018; The Qur’an 5:3; The Qur’an 6:119). Using this approach, a single prosecutor’s office had mediated 300 water well cases, searching for creative helping solutions such as ensuring that treated water from factories was used for fruit trees while polluted water was used for non-fruit trees. Prosecutor Mohebi’s nodal restorying of the networked governance of the river is illustrated by the fact that he meets weekly with the concerned NGOs that form part of the social movement to save the river and its community (Interview 051627).
Up to a point, Iranian law empowers victims with a right to forgive that prosecutors cannot ignore or completely overrule, although this does not apply to all crimes (Osanloo, 2020). Hence, if the victims of a corporation choose to forgive its executives after receiving compensation, apology, and support, this reduces criminal sentences in proportion to those parts of the sentences that are allocated to private crimes against victims. In one Mashad prosecutor’s office, more emphasis is placed on a court order that secures corporate reforms that prevent reoffending than on proportionate punishment, although the latter is also important. Our interviews with staff at other Iranian Judicial Agency offices outside Mashad made it clear that a production line of punitive sentences was much more standard than the ethic of care and prevention evidenced in the approach taken by these Mashad prosecutorial reformers. Certain Shari’a principles of Iranian law create space for innovation, however, such as compassion, mercy, azadi (freedom), and forgiveness, as does the general Islamic principle of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). The Golden Rule can trump the specificity of Iranian contract rules, for example, in a way not dissimilar to the way the principles of equity trump common law rules in the English legal tradition (Samet, 2018).
A prominent jurist and religious leader explained that responsiveness was also a fundamental principle of Shari’a law in the sense that rules must be interpreted in such a way that they are responsive to the times and the people (Interview 051608). We could have been interviewing Philip Selznick (1992) about his conception of the imperative for evolution toward responsive law (Hong & You, 2018). For our interviewee jurist, this was about the general direction in which the law should head; it was not about absolutes, because absolute attainment of responsiveness is impossible. The principle of Istihsan (Jamaludin & Buang, 2013; Kayadibi, 2007) means adaptation of law to the changing needs of society for justice and equity, as well as adaptation in terms of the way in which responsiveness secures a merciful Islamic spirit within the law.
One consequence of the politicized closure of secular courts and their replacement with shariat (Islamic) courts after the 1979 revolution was the revival of mediation and ancient shora (consultation) traditions. Traditional mediation helped to manage complaints that were beyond the capacity of a disintegrating post-revolution judiciary. The regime noticed that mediation’s ability to resolve cases more cheaply and quickly than the courts made it popular, especially in rural areas where people wanted to reconnect to tribal and Shari’a traditions. This return to mediation traditions was therefore legitimating for the revolutionary legal system. At all stages of Iranian history, traditional mediation fits many of the definitional features of what is today called restorative justice; it even allows for the participation of women as mediators, whereas women are formally and universally excluded as judges in the court system. Local grayhairs (respected elder women, many of whom were interviewed, e.g., Interview 051615) collaborating with graybeards also galvanized networks of women toward engagement with environmental reform.
Mohebi’s pitch to his superiors when his office became overwhelmed by cases from the Kashaf River crisis was: “Why not try a more caring, ‘restorative’ approach?” At first, his superiors pushed back against such unconventional thinking. They said that his job as a prosecutor was to enforce the law, and thus he was obligated to clear the river area of illegal activities. Mohebi persisted, however, arguing that the last time the full force of the law had been used to bulldoze through this complex of problems in 1992, the blowback for the state was hugely politically destabilizing when the immiserated rioted. This persuaded Tehran to allow him to try restorative justice and multiparty problem-solving (Interview 041707).
From this prosecutorial node of governance, a “Saviour of the Kashaf River Committee” was convened to engage civil society and business. The committee was a node of governance in the Shearing sense, one that embraced all of the relevant regulatory, industrial, and civil society organizations. However, it and the prosecutor’s office that convened it were less than “superstructural nodes,” insofar as such nodes are “command centre[s] of networked governance” (Burris et al., 2005). Being in the judicial as opposed to the executive branch of governance, the prosecutor’s office could hardly be allowed by the state to become superstructural. But perhaps the nodes that matter most are not superstructural—perhaps the critical nodes are nodes of multidimensional problem-solving by frontline workers who “proceed until they are apprehended”; they are not significantly empowered in any top-down sense, but they cobble together power that can be found everywhere (Foucault, 1990). It would be a pity if nodal governance were to replicate the tendency of Weberian bureaucracy toward managerialism by placing emphasis on a different kind of “head office” mentality. Our data reveal that nodes of local people working at the frontlines of particular problems—in this case, the nodes of those working on the frontline of action concerning the Kashaf River area—are what matter most.
More than 84 representatives were selected by the Saviour of the Kashaf River Committee and sent to many different hamlets along the river to convene regulatory conversations that ran for as long as five hours. The leaders of the NGOs involved saw their role as trying to build trust with the people. One way they did this was to discover the peoples’ demands and communicate these to the government and the judicial branch. They also gathered relevant scientific information about the impacts of polluted water on health and communicated this to target groups (such as mothers). They used a variety of processes, including night meetings, mutual dialogs, circles, debates, and even the screening of a documentary about underground water. Social networks and social media were used to inform people and network them.
One widespread response involved planting large numbers of (non-fruiting) trees to be harvested at a later date for timber; the space these trees occupied would prevent fruit and vegetables from being grown using polluted water. Prosecutor Bakshi commented that at first no one was confident that this action would stop illegal farming, but it has. Moreover, the police were not involved—instead, people in the Mayor’s office and those who had originally engaged in illegal planting contributed their labor. These farmers remain engaged in ongoing volunteer work as water quality monitors, working closely with the relevant government offices. According to Bakshi, their main motivation is to keep the area free from criminals.
Restorative justice cases did not only involve farmers and the factories that produced the pollution. We learned of one restorative justice case for the foreman of a large farm who had accepted a bribe from a factory to take irrigation water tainted with pollutants. The foreman lacked awareness of why this was a serious crime; he felt remorse, and he is now a champion for environmental citizenship within the Kashaf River community. This was one of a number of restorative cases that motivated the production of a video to educate farmers about why it is so wrong to become part of the “water mafia.”
During negotiations, farmers were given options rather than edicts; the farmers themselves were able to propose options. In Shearing’s terms, the process attempted to frame a caring path to “justice as a better future” (Froestad & Shearing, 2012), as opposed to the previous approach of brutally legalistic bulldozing. In addition, in Shearing’s terms, this was an AMP process that moved from Awareness to Motivation to a Pathway to a less bleak future (Honig et al., 2015). We were told of one example in which government officers were trying to encourage people living in the unauthorized buildings along the river to move into the new accommodations that had been repurposed for them. One man refused to budge, concerned about his pregnant wife and his opportunities to make a living. The prosecutor called a prosecutor in the man’s original city and asked if he could help to find him some work. Once arranged, the man returned to his hometown; some months later, he called the prosecutor and told him that he had named his son after him in gratitude.
Awareness was built in both Persian and Muslim ways. Many meetings occurred in the prayerful setting of the mosque, with appeals from locally respected religious leaders for polluters to respond with an Islamic spirit to the suffering of fellow citizens who were falling sick from consuming polluted food and to their obligations to ensure the health of their own children. The “good Muslim” and “good citizen of Iran” scripts were much discussed by all sides in a kind of motivational interviewing (Lundahl et al., 2010). The motivational interviewing “rolled with the resistance,” to move from Awareness to farmers finding their own Motivation. New resources often had to be brought into the circle in order for farmers to be able to see a Pathway that would really be helping them to have a better future. For example, farmers were assisted in installing water treatment systems. Appeals in the restorative circles to citizenship obligations also helped to mobilize large numbers of local volunteers as “Guardians of the River” to patrol for incidents and engage in consciousness-raising conversations with farmers and others about pollution. This strategy instantiated the World Future Council’s (2010, p. 12) vision of restorative cities that encourage “all citizens to take a stake in restorative development.”
At the more macro level of participatory restorative and responsive deliberation (Hong & You, 2018), farmer and industry associations, factory managers, and green NGOs were represented in the mediation process created to come up with a new river management plan.
The mosque used for restorative circles is sometimes the mosque located in the Judicial Agency office in Mashad city. This site melds a spiritual attitude of calm and care with the aura of judicial authority. Whether they are local or associated with the Judicial Agency, mosques’ association with ancient graybeard traditions of mediation imparts a dynamic escalation quality to meetings that can run for weeks. The traditional path of escalation is to bring into the meeting progressively more senior and more respected religious leaders or graybeards. While this does involve an escalation pyramid to greater authority to demand action and repair harm, it also involves an increased ability to mobilize resources for problem-solving purposes, as well as wider circles of care.
Graybeards and religious leader mediators sometimes attended the ritual occasions of families entangled in conflicts, such as weddings and funerals, to escalate the empathic engagement with the family by the most admired members of their community, even if the families were humble farmers or lowly members of that community. Such rituals of everyday life magnify compassion. Sometimes mediators organize a community work party in order to help a farmer get some large work project done on the farm or to overcome some setback.
Graybeard traditions are not as alive in their traditional form in Mashad as they are in some of the provinces visited during the research, such as Lorestan. Our argument here, following Harrington and Shearing (2017), is that these ancient traditions are in the background in Mashad, waiting to be appropriated by contemporary innovation in an ethic of care that will help farmers and factories to adapt to the Anthropocene, to love their fellow citizens, and to love their river.
None of this is to deny that many farmers, as well as some factory owners, were left worse off (particularly when required to relocate). Even then, they could sometimes see that the devastation to their futures was less than it would have been had the full force of the law been used to simply bulldoze through those futures. How much worse or better off people were depended on how rich were the resources of care and support brought into the circle, particularly the funding support and the state-leveraged bank loans to treat waste and shift productive activity to less ecologically destructive locations. In many cases, however, the risk-shifting path of creating the same problems by farming and digging new wells downstream was the path to a temporarily better, yet ultimately unsustainable, future.
The effort to persuade factories to destroy their polluting machines and practices and to retool with in-plant waste treatment, even after many days of multiparty restorative negotiations, was less successful than the effort to persuade farmers to destroy their dangerous vegetables and rise to the creative challenge of modifying their farms and wells (Interview 041709). However, with state help, there has been a willingness to link to state-funded treatment plants that serve multiple factories. Many small factories were persuaded to move away from the river by offers of relocation assistance and access to government-funded wastewater treatment by the same kinds of discussion circles the farmers experienced in the mosque to shape up Awareness, Motivation, and Pathways. Although regulatory agencies claim that these plants meet international standards, all of the NGO staff whom we interviewed expressed doubts as to whether this was true. Relocated factories were provided assistance to connect their effluent to five water purification and recycling plants funded by the state. Farmers and factories alike have been persuaded to move back 45 kilometers from the riverbanks, which are now becoming covered with trees.
7 PART 5. LIMITS OF RESTORATIVE NODAL GOVERNANCE IN REGULATING CORPORATE POWER
On the one hand, this is a redemptive story of genuine movement from the brutal bulldozing tactics of 1992 to motivating restorative pathways for the poor away from poverty. On the other, part of the story is bribes by the rich for pathways to their interests. Unfortunately, pathways to elite interests have more path-dependence than pathways in resilient service of the poor. Interviews with factory managers revealed that they had maintained large wells that been long protected by bribed inspectors, who were in turn protected by politicians. These factory managers continue to ignore the appeals of environmental NGOs and regulators. While much polluted water has been diverted to irrigation for tree planting, many factories continue to sell their polluted waste water illegally to farmers for food irrigation. At the same time, small illegal wells owned by poor farmers are sealed by enforcement action. Networks and nodes of governance need to be intensified rather than abandoned, because, as one leader (Dr Yazadi) in the fight to save the river explained:
The main thing is there is a very big mafia in almost everything, including the water problem, and unless we destroy that mafia, we cannot do anything useful. That mafia is so powerful that if we want to understand it, we have to go to the centre of it. Like a bird flying in the sky cannot see what is in the sea, you have to be a fish to see there (Yazdi, 2016).
This corruption destroys the river and undermines the trust and relationships built up between state and citizens through repeated restorative processes. Given the extent of corruption, disenchantment about the use of restorative justice would be expected for problems with such a deeply structural character. Yet, we were astonished when one of the most active leaders in the movement argued completely the contrary. Rather like Dr Yazadi quoted above, this leader argued that restorative justice was the only way forward given the imbalance of power involved. She noted that restorative justice had been important in allowing the movement’s leaders to get to where they are now in their understanding of the issues and the parties. Had they not done all that talking and relationship building, they could not have found “the unseen helping hands behind the scenes.”
In other words, there are people within government and private organizations who are opposed to the corruption and are looking for ways to support a better approach; reformers were able to find each other through the long restorative dialog. In addition, in our interviewee’s opinion, if the usual penal approach had been followed, it would not have identified the roots of the problem—there would not have been discussion about the different layers of pollution, and it would just have dealt with some specific illegality apparent on the surface. Citizens had not been aware of the deep sources of the problem; they thought it was one of seasonal workers and small-scale farmers. Today they see these as only making up roughly 20% of the problem, with 80% of the problem being factories and other large-scale polluters. Our conclusion is therefore that restorative nodal governance is less effective with crimes of the powerful, although it is still helpful for agonistic (Mouffe, 2013) contestation of hegemony that leads to prosecutions and popular protests, while in other moments it also leads to restorative settlements.
More strands may be needed to reinforce those networks. As one weak reed after another in a network of governance is snapped by corporate power, more strands in the web of governance can be woven into place to strengthen the fabric. Some of those strands must be made of tougher stuff. As regulatory scholars have long shown (Braithwaite, 2008; Gunningham et al., 1998), complex problems require a complex regulatory mix. That mix must be innovatively and responsively applied when the powerful continue to dominate. When restorative justice repeatedly fails, escalation to more punitive forms of justice to protect the environment is imperative. Our discussion here is intended to show how rather than seeing restorative justice and punitive justice as either/or, we should see them as with/and. Restorative justice can be made more effective when it is woven together with punitive justice, and, in turn punitive justice can be made more effective in the presence of restorative justice options.
In relation to the Kashaf River, it seems necessary for some corporate executives to be put in prison and for their companies to suffer large penalties or even be taken over by the state. Regulatory officials who take bribes must feel they are at risk of criminal prosecution. The entrenched capture and corruption we have described makes this easier said than done. However, the Iranian criminal procedure law of 2015, which now allows NGOs to launch criminal actions against corporate offenders, already shows promise, as does a recent NGO criminal suit that alleged criminality against managers in regulatory agencies regarding industrial wastewater enforcement. An even stronger strand to add to such networked regulation of pollution would be to give NGOs and whistleblowers access to a percentage of the fines imposed in such cases.
Another way to weave together stronger strands is to widen the restorative circle, reaching out not only horizontally into state departments and institutions where there are hidden allies, but also vertically into the international realm. Hence, there has been an effort to strategically strengthen linkages with international NGOs and the United Nations in order to bring about some kind of accountability on the part of government actors and the powerful business interests they protect from the ongoing struggles to clean the Kashaf River.
We have argued that a complex nest of problems requires constant elaboration and the development of a multilevel response that comes from many nodes of governance. While we do see that fabric being repeatedly torn by corporate power, the most realistic remedy may be to keep sewing it back together with new threads that have the strength to repair the weaker fabric that was so readily torn. It is unlikely that adding more horizontal restorative strands will ever be sufficient for that purpose. Without the specter of vertical escalation to tougher enforcement, it is hard to imagine factory owners who lack an environmental conscience sitting up to take notice. By the same token, vertical state enforcement may remain illusory without pressure being brought to bear by broader international engagement or bottom-up pressure coming from restorative and other locally driven processes. This need for diverse input provides one more reason to resist any geopolitics that excludes and polarizes by stigmatizing Iran and closing off spaces for widening restorative circles in the international domain.
Turning back again to Shearing, one main agenda of his scholarship has been exploration of how landscapes of inequality are produced and reproduced and how they might be reconfigured as landscapes of equality. Shearing’s own reflections on the insights about power arising from the restorative approach to the Kashaf River crisis that we detailed here are as follows:
The nodal governance perspective directs attention to assemblages of power and contests between these assemblages;
The storybook focus identifies the narrative structures that maintain power differentials and considers how these might be challenged and refigured;
The justice as a better future theme directs attention to a normative focus on shifting power architectures that moves away from backward-looking accountability;
The AMP focus explores how shifts in architectures of AMP to empowerment of the poor might challenge path-dependencies that favor entrenched power;
The ethic of care theme recognizes human entanglements with other earthlings and the importance of appreciating the broader power structures inherent in these relationships, which can either trap the powerless or be harnessed for liberation along the riverbanks.
Coherence forged by the integration of concepts shared between normative and explanatory theory is likewise central to Pettit’s (1999) republican theory of freedom as non-domination. Braithwaite et al. (2007) argues that through empirical studies of landscapes of the denizenship of places, he learned from Pettit that regulation remains misunderstood and dangerous unless moored to a normative commitment to domination reduction. We can therefore integrate Shearing’s five insights as nodally restoried non-domination.
8 CONCLUSION
In the Kashaf River corridor, we discovered, somewhat surprisingly, a coherence in five strands of Shearing’s thought that has not been apparent in previous research. Nodal governance of the river tackles nests of problems as diverse as homelessness, ill-health, crime, employment, state tyranny, and ecological crisis. To deliver on these multiplex fronts, nodal governance needed to do more than create Awareness and Motivation for reform; it also needed to uncover Pathways to a transformative geopolitics of place that involved a restorative ethic of care. That could not be accomplished without patient, participatory restorying of the river by its peoples, a restorying that connected to Shari’a and to the Persian traditions of these particular peoples in counterhegemonic ways. The power of the people was feeble relative to the power of the factory owners and police bulldozers until it mobilized the muscle of the mosque, the prosecutor, NGOs, and the mayor at other nodes that were locally strategic. Justice as a better future was an imaginary that opened glimmers of possibility for river people who wanted homes, jobs, and freedom from fear of crime; for middle-class city-dwellers who feared food contaminated by the river; for a mayor, a police force, and a state for whom rioting citizens burning banks and police headquarters was not the destablilized future they wanted; and for religious leaders who wanted a better future of justice with a merciful Shari’a face. Surprisingly, European diplomats also play a part in our story. Their justice as a better future for the Anthropocene involves an Iran that commits to the Paris agreement on climate change and that receives a caring ethic of practical help from Europe to keep its rivers clean and flowing. This is in the hope that crisis in Iran will not push it over a cliff into threatening a regional nuclear conflagration, which would represent a desolute future for Europe, as well as for the people of Iran.
Fuller (1964, p. 33) argued that the full judicial process is only good for two types of questions: yes/no (“Did she do it?”) and more/less (“How much should be paid?”) questions. Polanyi (1951, pp. 174–84) distinguished these from polycentric problems that require multidimensional negotiation of interacting complexity. While the Fuller/Polanyi insight remains a rich one, we have seen that it does not preclude a judicial agency from becoming a node of governance that helps to solve polycentric problems with polycentric (nodal) governance. It does not preclude a judicial agency from hiring mediators, recruiting victim support volunteers, and networking multiple layers of governance and civil society using a restorative and responsive strategy that is also capable of escalating up to imprisonment of factory owners. It does not preclude a totally patriarchal male judicial branch from catalyzing women mediators to participate in restorative nodal governance. Critics could argue that perhaps the catalytic node of governance here was not the office of Bakhshi Mohebi but the Saviour of Kashaf River Committee, or even the mayor’s office. These are not unreasonable ways of seeing the Kashaf River community’s history.
Our reflections on this narrative attract us to the hypothesis that institutional structures do not prevent new nodes of governance of polycentric problems from being energized almost anywhere and under almost any circumstance of democratization. New nodes can emerge in the most authoritarian region of an authoritarian society. This is possible because of Shearing and Ericson’s (1991) insight that restorying a problem-solving imaginary can occur in the most implausible of authoritarian locales, including the lunchrooms of local police stations where police share stories of how they worked with others to stick with a problem and fix it. Rewriting institutional rulebooks is important intellectual work and rightly attracts scholarly attention. Rewriting storybooks at local nodes of governance that happen to be populated by reformers with a transformative imagination attracts less interest—but it too deserves similar attention.
Decades from now, the Kashaf River may be seen as a site of deep desertification. Fear of that does not mean that wealthy city-dwellers should be content to nestle with their grandchildren in the temporary comfort of their city while failing to engage with experiments in new modalities of governance that attempt to hold back the desert from rolling over the grandchildren of the river. Mashad citizens can and are attempting to keep some clean water flowing for future generations. The survival threats of the Anthropocene demand learning from experimentation. These threats present the meager public policy treatments of the Holocene with what amounts to multiple-drug resistance. Proximate human extinction is likely without experiments in restorying our future. It is plausible that accidental cascading of a nuclear weapons exchange from Pakistan or Israel (Braithwaite & D’Costa, 2018) could wipe out the people of the Kashaf River long before the desert rolls over them. We must not be nihilistic about their struggle, even if that struggle makes life better only temporarily. Due to the complexity of polycentric crises, there is an imperative to pursue new ideas for seeding disparate problem-solving imaginaries on many fronts at once. The plural assemblage of thought proposed by Clifford Shearing is just one such possible method of experimental bricolage. A method of searching out other spaces of extreme depth and complexity with respect to polycentric problems could uncover other multidimensional solutions that prove theoretically coherent in least-likely cases and at least-likely sites (Eckstein, 2000).
Endnotes
1 Western definitions of restorative justice should perhaps not be of central relevance given that the restorative narrative here is grounded in Persian and Islamic traditions. Nevertheless, these practices fit a definition of restorative justice as a relational process in which all stakeholders in an injustice have an opportunity to come together to discuss who has been harmed and what should be done to repair the harm and meet their needs. 2 We first sent our article to Shearing for comment during its revision phase. We are grateful for his feedback. 3 Each involved collaborations with nodes of Shearing co-authors—more than a dozen—who were critical to their development. We mean no disrespect to them. It is just that our work forges links across all five “Shearing insights”; Shearing is the only author of all five, and none of his co-authors recur across the different insights. 4 Refer to Endnote 3. 5 Relevant interviews were with a dozen Mediation Council mediators, prosecutors, and judges operating through that office (Interview 051627), businesses affected by court enforcement actions (Interview 091707), and environmental and other NGOs involved in some of the cases.
Biographies
John Braithwaite (PhD Queensland) is Emeritus and founder at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University. He is best known for work on restorative justice, peacebuilding and responsive regulation (johnbraithwaite.com).
Honeye Hojabrosadati has a PhD in Criminal Law and Criminology, Tarbiat Modares University of Tehran. Her research and publications in Farsi are mainly focused on Social Justice and Access to justice. She was Assistant professor at Islamic Azad University for last ten years, but currently is undertaking research into Narratives and Gender Inequalities in Iran.
Miranda Forsyth (PhD Australian National University) is an Associate Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) in the College of Asia and Pacific at ANU. She is a socio-legal scholar with a focus on restorative justice and law, justice and violence in Melanesia.
Recent decades have witnessed heightened public and governmental awareness of the nature and scale of environmental challenges likely to face the planet over the course of the next fifty to one hundred years. Scholars from across a broad range of disciplines have been drawn into these debates and have begun to reorient their research towards finding solutions to some of the most pressing problems and to devising more sustainable and resilient livelihoods. Archaeologists, with their conventional orientation toward past events and processes have been rather slower to engage with these issues. Recently, however, there has been a steady shift within the discipline so as to incorporate more future-oriented perspectives, and ‘the use of the past to plan for a better future’ is rapidly becoming a common theme within archaeological research projects and publications. While welcoming some of these developments, this paper offers a critical assessment of the various claims that are now being made of archaeology’s potential to help overcome current environmental challenges and its contributions to defining and understanding ‘the Anthropocene.’
We live in an era of heightened environmental awareness. Terms such as ‘global warming,’ ‘greenhouse gasses,’ ‘carbon foot-prints’ and ‘climate change’ have entered the public sphere and our everyday lexicons; their effects and causes are debated by our politicians and hotly contested in the blogosphere. Anxieties over environmental catastrophe have displaced the fear of a nuclear winter that circulated during the years of the Cold War. Dystopian visions increasingly dominate the entertainment industry’s imaginings of the future, and we are all encouraged on a daily basis to recycle, down-scale, be green and think globally while acting locally. That this last notion was first popularized over four decades ago has inevitably prompted many to argue that all this hand wringing is too little too late—the future of our species on this planet is bleak.
Recent extreme weather events serve to heighten such concerns—such as those that in early 2014 left one side of the United States coping with Arctic temperatures and paralyzed under feet of snow, while the farming industry on the other side of the continent was struggling to deal with an acute shortage of water for livestock and irrigation. Or those, also in early 2014, that left up to a quarter of England and Wales inundated by flood waters for weeks, and in some areas months, at a time. In response to such events, our political leaders are often blamed for their lack of foresight and environmental planning while they are simultaneously exhorted to act as if they, unlike King Canute, have the power to control the elements. Individual members of the public are likewise on the one hand castigated for their environmental foolishness, as evinced by their apparent addiction to unbridled consumerism, while they are also praised for their fortitude, public minded actions and ‘natural’ instinct toward selfless acts of generosity following major ‘environmental disasters,’ especially those that impact parts of the Global South—such as the typhoons that flattened parts of the Philippines in 2013, or the extended drought across eastern and north-eastern Africa during 2010–11 that devastated livestock herds and pastoralist communities.
Taking a broader view, the heightened environmental concerns of our age, and the cumulative events that triggered them, are seen by many in the scientific community as attributable to, or at least symptomatic of, the commencement of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene (Dryzek 2013; Ellis and Trachtenberg 2014; Wapner 2014), identifiable through distinct stratigraphic indicators including marked increases in percentages of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane as recorded in polar ice cores alongside broadly coeval changes in biological assemblages. More recent work (e.g., Waters et al.2014), has expanded the number of additional potential stratigraphic markers to include, among others, certain types of anthropogenic soils, the intensification of processes of anthroturbation, changes in reef system ecological functioning and signals, the globalization of biological transfers, and the radiogenic fallout from testing nuclear weapons. As awareness of the concept has grown, and as public and political concern over the future of our planet has stimulated an upscaling in the amount of research funding available for studying the causes, drivers and consequences of climate change, archaeologists have been increasingly drawn into debates over the concept of an Anthropocene and wider human-nature interactions (e.g., Solli 2011; Edgeworth 2014). Of course, climate change research in archaeology is not a new field—there is a long tradition of archaeologists exploring human-environment relationships from different theoretical perspectives and through the study and analysis of a broad range of material, biological and geochemical proxies (for reviews of this intellectual history, see e.g., Sandweiss and Kelley 2012; Davies and M’Mbogori 2013; Van de Noort 2013: 19–43). However, what has changed over the last decade is that this tradition of research is now frequently mobilized in support of the argument that archaeologists have a central role to play in addressing the challenges posed by future climate change (see e.g., Hudson et al.2012), rather than solely offering backward-looking perspectives on past climate cycles and human responses and contributions to earlier phases of environmental change. Thus, Marcy Rockman (2012: 194), while acknowledging that “archaeology cannot provide all the answers,” has argued:
“Without the data, information, ideas and interpretations that the field of archaeology can provide, there is much less of a chance of developing appropriate, workable, and durable means of addressing mitigation and adaptation issues.”
“By offering long-term perspectives on human interrelationships with climate change, archaeology is well placed to enhance an understanding of the socio-ecological resilience of communities and their adaptive capacity. This would appear to be archaeology’s chief contribution to the climate change debate.”
The logical extension of such arguments is that archaeological data, as repository of adaptive pathways, when set within long-term perspectives, offer insights into how past societies responded to earlier phases of climate change, and so have the potential to help build the social resilience of contemporary communities in the face of rapid climate change (e.g., Guttmann-Bond 2010; Brown et al.2011; Van der Noort 2013). The growing use of archaeological data as environmental proxies by climate change researchers also signals this increased prominence of archaeology in current climate change discourse (for discussions of this trend see Sandweiss and Kelley 2012; Brooke 2014).
Welcome though such developments are, there remain several underpinning assumptions and unexamined philosophical questions that need to be addressed before archaeologists can claim that their research on past human-environment interactions, the historical ecology of ancient landscapes, and the resilience of past societies can provide actual solutions to the environmental challenges of our time. In what follows I explore these with reference to the concept of the Anthropocene and especially debates over its origins. My perspective is that of someone specializing in the later Holocene archaeology of Africa and with interests in landscape historical ecology and the production of useable pasts aimed at addressing contemporary societal challenges (Lane 2010, 2011). I argue in particular, that while it is important that archaeologists explore the potential contributions their knowledge and data sets may have toward addressing current and predicted future environmental challenges, it remains reasonable to ask: “Just how much contemporary public good can such a deep-time perspective provide?” Put another way, some of the claims that some archaeologists have made in recent years that our discipline can help us navigate the hazards of the Anthropocene—whether this is in terms of providing evidence of the resilience of many non-Western societies or on past responses to climate change, need to be substantiated rather than simply asserted.
The Anthropocene
The notion of ‘the Anthropocene’ was introduced to the scholarly community in its current guise in 2000, by the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). Their coining of this term was intended to convey the idea that the environmental impacts of human activities since the Industrial Revolution no longer have consequences solely at the local or regional scale, but do so at a global scale. In this sense, human activities, collectively, are now equivalent to those of geological processes, and for proponents of the concept of an Anthropocene, the term suggests that the Earth is moving, or has already moved, out of the current geological epoch, the Holocene, into a new one. Critically, advocates in favor of this argument also believe that unlike any other point in Earth’s history, it is the cumulative effects of human activity that is triggering this exit from the Holocene. In other words, humanity has become a global geological force in its own right (Steffen et al. 2007: 614).
Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) acknowledged that humans have long shaped their environments and that their activities have had environmental consequences. They noted that over the entire course of the Holocene there is evidence indicating increasing levels of human influence, including diverse biotic and sedimentary signals, such as pollen of weeds and cultivars following land clearance for agriculture, and sediment pulses from deforested regions. They also recognized that atmospheric lead pollution arising from human activities begins to be registered in polar ice cores and in sediments around the world from Greco-Roman times onward. Nonetheless, they saw the commencement of the Industrial Revolution around a.d. 1750 as initiating a step change in terms of the scale of such impacts. Subsequently, with Will Steffen and John McNeill, Crutzen extended these arguments with reference to a larger body of indices and proxies (Steffen et al.2007), to argue that since a.d. 1800 there had been two broad stages to the Anthropocene. These comprised an initial stage, which they termed ‘The Industrial era,’ lasting to ca. a.d. 1945, characterized by a dramatic and increasingly global rise in the burning of fossil fuels and associated production of greenhouse gases compared with all pre-Industrial Revolution epochs, and a more recent ongoing phase, which they termed ‘The Great Acceleration,’ commencing after the end of World War II up to the present day characterized by the almost exponential acceleration of ‘the human enterprise’ across the globe.
As evidence for these stages, they cited a wide selection of different proxies, of which changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were considered to be the most significant benchmark. Based on available data, global carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times, and higher than they have ever been at any time in the past 0.8 million years, as are those of methane and nitrous oxide (IPCC 2014: SYR-9). In 1850, CO2 concentrations were still within the range recorded for interglacial periods during the late Quaternary at around 285 ppm. By the end of the ‘Industrial Era’ stage they had risen by around 25 ppm, beyond any recorded upper limits of ‘natural variation,’ and by 2005 had reached 379 ppm (Steffen et al. 2007: 616). If human population growth, agriculture and industrial activities continue to accelerate at more or less the same pace as witnessed since 1945, the concentration of global greenhouse gases (GHGs) are predicted to double by the end of the twenty-first century (IPCC 2014: SYR-9-11).
Compared with GHGs, the rise in global temperature has been slower, possibly as a result of the effects of industrially derived sulphate aerosols—the so-called “global dimming” effect. Nonetheless, owing to anthropogenic carbon emissions, temperatures in the past 120 years rose by an estimated average of 0.85° C and the rate of increase has accelerated in the past two decades. In some predictions, mean average temperatures are expected to rise by around between 3.0° and 4.0° C by the end of this century (Sherwood et al.2014). Even modest temperature rises are expected to accelerate ice loss in the Arctic and Antarctic and increase ocean heat content, leading to sea-level rise, accentuating the documented rise in global mean sea level (GMSL) since the 1860s of around 250 mm (Church and White 2006), with some scholars suggesting that this could result in an overall rise in GMSL in excess of one meter by 2100, potentially resulting in forced displacement of over 185 million people (Nicholls et al.2011). Additionally, relative to pre-Industrial Revolution oceans, surface ocean waters are now more acidic by a factor of 0.1 pH units, due to anthropogenic carbon release, and the projected effects of future acidification will be both physical and biological, thereby hindering carbonate-secreting organisms in building their skeletons, with potentially severe effects in both benthic (especially coral reef) and planktonic settings.
For proponents of the Anthropocene, it is recent changes in the scale and intensity of a host of human activities that have been the likely drivers of these changes, which in turn have triggered a wide range of environmental consequences from depletion of fisheries to falling aquifers, increased soil erosion, ecosystem fragmentation and biodiversity loss (e.g., Steffen et al.2007; Rockström et al.2009; Ellis et al.2010; Hughes et al.2013). Where debate remains is often over which sedimentary marker, or markers, provide the best “isochronous datum” indicative of “a critical change in the sedimentary sequence (golden spike)” that is also sufficiently universal that it “can be considered the boundary between two epochs (i.e., the Holocene and the Anthropocene)” (Rull 2013: 1198). As Rull (2013) notes, while agreement on this point is likely essential for formal recognition of the Anthropocene by the International Commission of Stratigraphy (ICS) and its Anthropocene Working Group, the work done by more informal manifestations of the concept is likely to be far more important.
In this regard, it is important to note that concepts similar to that of the Anthropocene have been proposed by previous generations of scholars at times when public concerns over the future of the planet and our species were much less heightened than they are today. In 1778, for example, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), observed in his book Époques de la nature, that “the entire face of the Earth now bears the imprint of man’s power” (cited in Locher and Fressoz 2012: 579). A century later, the Italian Roman Catholic priest and geologist Antonio Stoppani similarly acknowledged the increasing influence of humanity on Earth systems when he used the term ‘Anthropozoic’ in his 1873 Corso di Geologia (Crutzen 2000). In the 1920s and 1930s, the French philosopher, geologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chadrin and the Russian mineralogist and naturalist Vladimir I. Vernadsky favoured the term ‘Noosphere.’ Later in the twentieth century, E.O. Wilson used the ‘Eremozoic’ and Andrew Revkin that of the ‘Anthrocene’—both proposed in 1992—to convey many of the same ideas encapsulated by Crutzen’s notion of an Anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2011: 843–5). As a scientific idea, the concept of an age when humanity, through collective and cumulative actions, has the power to drive Earth system processes is thus far less revolutionary than the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene’ might suggest (see also Sayre 2012; Castree 2014).
Likewise, some of the philosophical debates that have been prompted by the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene also have a distinguished ancestry. John Stuart Mill, for example, in his 1874 essay ‘On Nature’ was particularly critical of the doctrine ‘follow nature’ on the grounds that:
“If nature encompasses everything that exists in the natural world and all the laws that govern it, then “follow nature” is vacuous because it tells us to do something we have no way of not doing … On the other hand, if “follow nature” … means something akin to … “let nature take its course” independent of our intervention, then … we have a moral injunction utterly unworthy of our support” (Hourdequin 2013: 116).
Mill’s position finds its modern-day expression in, on the one hand, the public’s exhortations for their politicians to do something about the floods, the drought, the snowstorms, coastal erosion and the like, while on the other hand being equally vociferous about the need to protect ‘nature’ where it is believed to still survive in a ‘pristine’ state and to restore habitats to their ‘natural’ state where it is believed they have been damaged by humanity. Concerned as we may be about the consequences of climate change, few of us would feel comfortable if we did let ‘nature’ completely overwhelm our dwelling spaces, yet we also mourn ‘nature’s loss’ each time news reaches us that yet that another species facing extinction has been placed on the IUCN’s Red List. Being in the Anthropocene, in other words, raises some profound moral and ethical questions for us as citizens. It also requires scholars who claim that their research activities can help address today’s global environmental challenges also engage with these more philosophical dimensions of the Anthropocene discourse. As Hourdequin (2013: 116) notes:
“Debate over the Anthropocene can be separated into two distinct questions. First, is it true that humans are the key drivers of biological, geological, and chemical processes on Earth? And second, if the answer to the first question is affirmative, [and the weight of scientific evidence suggests that this is so] then what should we do about it?”
Hourdequin argues that the second question is more salient from an ethical perspective, although determining a suitable response depends to a considerable extent on how the first is answered. Put another way, as “an emergent narrative in global environmental politics,” the Anthropocene concept requires us to “reimagine how humans make connections between planetary and everyday life in ethical, sustainable, and ecologically just ways” (Houston 2013: 440).
Anthropocene Archaeology
Of the various recent archaeological considerations of archaeology in the age of the Anthropocene, most critical engagements with the concept have concerned themselves with Hourdequin’s (2013) first question, rather than the second. In this, they have largely been following the lead of the environmental scientist William Ruddiman (2003), who was among the first group of scholars to propose a counter-thesis to that of Crutzen and Stoermer, citing evidence that important anthropogenic effects on the environment and on global climate began thousands of years ago and were already extensive well before the start of the industrial era. Among other arguments, Ruddiman has pointed out that the observational records and related data sets on which Crutzen and Stoermer developed their case, were spatially incomplete and do not reflect the actual distribution or extent of human activities even at the start of the Industrial Revolution. More recently, Ruddiman (2013) has questioned whether the size of population is a good proxy indicator of the amount of cultivated land and deforestation (both implicated in the increase in GHGs), and that linked increases in population and land-use change have grown in an exponential unidirectional manner. Neither assumption, he argues, is consistent with available historical evidence. Drawing on historical studies of dynastic administrative records concerning land-use trends during the past 2,000 years across the entire agricultural area of east-central China, for example, Ruddiman (2013: 51) notes that whereas the per-capita area cultivated nearly 2,000 years ago was 0.6–0.7 hectares per person it had fallen to 0.15–0.2 hectares by the 1800s. Similarly, in contrast to the claims made by those in favor of a relatively recent origin of the Anthropocene, once evidence from historical, palaeoecological and archaeological is taken into account it is quite possible that as much as three-quarters of the world’s forest had been felled by the start of the industrial era (Ruddiman 2013: 52–4).
Historical data from Europe, in particular, reveal more extensive early clearance than reconstructed by Crutzen and Stoermer. Specifically, here, forest clearance seems to have been widespread at a relatively early date when population densities were still quite low, and well before even the Medieval era. Consequently, even though there have been marked increases in population across Europe over the last few thousand years, these had limited effects on deforestation, and the available evidence even suggests that, as in China, per-capita clearance may well have fallen over the last 2,000 years by a factor of three to four (Kaplan et al.2009). In a similar vein, Dorian Fuller and colleagues (2011) have argued that the rapid expansion of irrigated rice agriculture in Asia between 5,000 and 1,000 years ago, as with the spread of herding regimes and domestic livestock across Asia and Africa, led to a significant increase in global methane emissions globally.
Other recent archaeological contributions to this debate make rather similar points concerning the long history of global-scale human impacts on the environment. Leaving aside the question as to whether the ICS, who actually determine how and whether geological epochs can be named by scientists agree to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch (something they will not decide upon until 2016), opinion also seems to be shifting toward a two-phase definition of the Anthropocene. Namely, an early phase that began several thousands of years ago, although opinion differs on exactly how long ago (compare, for instance, Olofsson and Hickler 2008; Certini and Scalenghe 2011; Ellis et al.2013; Smith and Zeder 2013), initially at a fairly small scale but with impacts becoming far more significant by the start of the industrial era; and, a later, very rapid phase of accelerating and widespread impacts from ca. a.d. 1750 (Ruddiman 2013).
To date, archaeology’s contribution, while valuable, has been largely constrained to the task of better defining when humans began influencing their environments, the nature of these changes (which may not always have had negative impacts), their spatial and temporal scale and their socio-ecological legacies. This is certainly important and much needed work—we know little about these issues for many parts of the globe and for numerous time periods (Kintigh et al.2014; Seddon et al.2014). However, a common thread in such arguments is the emphasis they place on the need to disentangle natural from human processes. While certainly valuable from a heuristic perspective so as to determine the relative weight of different factors as drivers of change and stability at particular moments in the past, the conceptual prioritizing of this need ultimately reinforces a tacit epistemological commitment to evaluating ecological relationships explicitly with regard to an a priori baseline. As Nathan Sayre (2012: 61) notes, this belief in “a pristine, original nature untouched by humans” verges on the ideological among many environmentalists and ecologists, since without such a baseline “how is one to define the environment to be protected or preserved?” From such a perspective the challenge becomes, as so aptly illustrated by the divergent opinions on when, if at all, the Anthropocene began, determining which point in time can be said to qualify as a ‘pre-human impact’ baseline.
To circumvent such dualistic thinking it is important that greater intellectual space is created for a consideration of the mutual, co-construction and production of the world through the ever accumulating processes of human-thing entanglement (Hodder 2011). Likewise, there needs to be more overt recognition that ‘environment’ must be understood partly as a social and political category that emerges from intimate engagements with its physical realities (Tvedt 2010; Angelo 2013); consideration of the materiality of things in and of the world and the manner in which these shape such intimate relationships (Olsen 2010); and acknowledgement of the agency of non-human entities (Strang 2014), and the ‘more-than-human’ dimensions of human-animal encounters (Cassidy 2012; Wilkie 2015). In short, what much of the science-driven debates on the Anthropocene lack is recognition of the potential contributions of the post-humanism turn across the social sciences and humanities of the last few decades, which has challenged the privileged place of the modern human subject and sought to animate these disciplines by including those affects, emotions and sensibilities previously excluded from the narrow remit of Enlightenment rationality.
Archaeology of the Anthropocene
Aside from pointing to evidence in support of a deep history to the Anthropocence, the potential threats to livelihoods, food security, and patterns of human settlement posed by accelerating climate change and the anticipated disruption to current social, economic and political orders this may trigger, have encouraged scrutiny of the implications that commencement of the Anthropocene may have for humanity’s tangible and intangible heritage. For some (e.g., Murphy et al.2009; Sabbioni et al.2010; Barthel-Bouchier 2012), the issues of concern are how best to protect archaeological sites, monuments, deposits, material remains and other components of the built environment from the threats climate change may pose to their long-term future. For others, the impacts of climate change may manifest themselves in a far “more fundamental, almost existential” manner by changing how heritage is conceptualized and how “scientific narratives about the past” are produced (Solli 2011: 42).
Aspects of these ideas have also been explored in a recent set of short essays (Edgeworth 2014) outlining alternative archaeological approaches to the Anthropocene. Adopting a more critical perspective on the value of creating a new age to add to all the other ‘ages’ that impose boundaries on archaeological interpretation and compartmentalize the way our discipline approaches its study of the past, most of the contributors still accept the underlying premise that humanity now lives in the Anthropocene. However, unlike those archaeologists who have sought to illustrate the deep-time history of human environmental impacts on Earth systems, several of these authors explore in different ways the ‘archaeology’ (in the Foucauldian sense, although with a greater emphasis on materiality) of the Anthropocene as a concept. Others are more concerned with ‘Anthropocene archaeology,’ i.e. the distinctive material traces of this epoch and their referents at both a planetary (e.g., Benjamin 2014; Zarankin and Salerno 2014) and extra-planetary (Gorman 2014) scale. Most of these contributors associate ‘the Anthropocene’ with modernity, although some view the concept as little more than an over-determined slogan (Clarke 2014: 101). Individually and collectively, these papers work to complicate the idea of the/an Anthropocene. In particular, they underscore the fact that whether we live in a new geological epoch or not, and however we choose to define such a time, humans have always been entangled with their material environments. In this sense, the concept of the Anthropocene, precisely because it subverts older nature/culture binaries, could be said to be ideally suited to describing the entire course of human history and our evolution as a species.
Nonetheless, as already alluded to, discussions in the wider Anthropocene discourse of human manipulations of the environment still tend to reproduce the Enlightenment idea that human action inherently acts against nature and so degrades it (see Escobar 1999). This is particularly clear from the emerging conceptualization of fire as “the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene” (Malm and Hornborg 2014: 63). Thus, according to Michael Raupach and Josep Canadell (2010: 210–211), “long before the industrial era, a particular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon,” while for Steffen and colleagues (2007: 614), “the mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene.” In their commentary on such observations Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note that there is more than a hint of inevitability in such statements, as if the growth of a fossil-fuel economy was determined in the Early Stone Age in Africa when Homo Erectus learned to make and control fire—determined no doubt by their ‘natural’ human curiosity and propinquity for invention driven in turn by external evolutionary pressures. Yet, as they point out, our reliance on the fossil fuels which have driven the increase in GHGs and the climate changes that have accompanied this, has a specific history allied to the activities of a very narrow social and economic class of British, other European and North American industrialists and entrepreneurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose control over the means of production and economic power owed much to the profits reaped from participation in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of Europe’s urban and rural poor. Zoe Crossland (2014: 125) similarly recognizes this, remarking that:
“The Anthropocene is a political project as much as a scientific one, and to embed its origins in the long history of the Holocene is to spread genesis, and the responsibility for it, across many different human societies.”
Indeed, as anthropologists and political ecologists have long pointed out, resource management is based on diverse social, political and cultural features, differing societal and individual perceptions of and physical engagements with the bio-physical world, the choices made by different interest groups and individuals, and their differential power to do so. However, many of the processes of environmental change that are summarized by the concept “The Anthropocene” are not readily observable by the human senses. They act at spatial and temporal scales that are too big or too minute to fall within the range of human perception. Other than for specialists in earth system processes and atmospheric chemistry, the concept accomplishes little more than an epistemic distancing—as global processes they lose the very properties the concept is intended to emphasize, namely their association with human actions. Erik Swyngedouw (2011) is likewise critical of the manner in which the discourse surrounding climate change works to de-politicize the issues involved, despite all of the political rhetoric and grandstanding that claims otherwise (Wynne 2010). He argues, in particular, that as “the concept of Nature [and the need to protect or restore it] becomes ideology par excellence and functions ideologically … it forecloses thought, disavows the inherent slippery [aspects] of the concept and ignores the multiplicities, inconsistencies, and incoherencies inscribed in its symbolization” (Swyngedouw 2011: 258). Thus, whereas humanity’s responsibility for triggering increases in GHGs, species loss, the homogenization of biodiversity and a host of other ‘environmental ills,’ may well be recognized, by pushing the origins of these human impacts increasingly further back in time we effectively distance ourselves, i.e. Western society and modernity, from culpability. Once we recognize this, Malm and Hornborg (2014: 65) suggest:
“the main paradox of the narrative, if not of the concept as such, becomes visible: Climate change is denaturalised in one moment – relocated from the sphere of natural causes to that of human activities – only to be re-naturalised in the next, when derived from an innate human trait, such as the ability to control fire. Not nature, but human nature – this … is the Anthropocene displacement.”
Not Nature, but Human Practice
The visibility of the environmental costs that the accumulated consequences of human activities have left as a legacy for all of humanity today is, in itself, a resource which is not evenly spread over the human population of the Earth. Archaeology has an important role in mapping the history of these costs, to increase the visibility of such distributional injustice and draw attention to the need for possible interventions. It is noteworthy, therefore, that an interesting contrast can be drawn between the kinds of globalizing discourse concerning the origins of the Anthropocene discussed above, and more regional scale studies of long-term historical ecologies of specific landscapes. Many of the more effective studies have been those conducted in so-called Lesser Developed Countries in the Global South, where the need to demonstrate the social or public good of academic research is often pronounced—and certainly reinforced by the prevailing conditions of poverty and environmental vulnerability encountered by researchers while in the field and the often limited political power of the local communities with whom they work. Thus, for example, several archaeological projects in different parts of Latin America have had a long tradition of applying archaeological knowledge so as to help create, or recreate, environmentally sustainable farming practices in a manner that also improves local livelihoods (e.g., Erickson 1985; Beach and Dunning 1995; Kendall 1997, 2005; Renard et al.2011; Isendahl et al.2012), although some of these efforts have not been without their critics (e.g., Swartley 2002). In both Latin America and elsewhere, other projects have drawn on archaeological results so as to inform the restoration of particular habitats and to guide wildlife conservation efforts (see Hayashida 2005, and Wolverton and Lyman 2012, respectively, for indicative examples).
To date, nothing precisely comparable to the kind of rehabilitation of former agricultural practices explicitly using archaeological datasets, as undertaken in Bolivia and the Andes, has been attempted in sub-Saharan Africa. This is despite several decades of widespread positive valuation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and ‘traditional’ farming practices within the community of ‘development’ specialists (Stigter et al. 1995), and numerous efforts to integrate such knowledge in the planning for sustainable futures (e.g., Reij et al.1996; Hart and Vorster 2008; Pretty et al.2011). Several recent and ongoing projects, nonetheless, have sought to employ a ‘deep time’ perspective on farming and risk management strategies so as to help identify the antecedents and possible drivers of current environmental challenges. These tend to be more place- and problem-focused, and are often oriented toward deconstructing prevailing policy narratives that have directed (some might argue misdirected) environmental interventions at a local level for decades (e.g., French et al.2009; Lane 2009; Sulas 2010). Other projects have sought to better delineate which aspects of contemporary practices can be said to genuinely contribute to socio-ecological and cultural resilience (e.g., Sulas et al.2009; Davies 2012), while also offering critical perspectives on concepts such as ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and TEK, and especially the ahistorical manner in which these concepts are currently deployed in rural development projects across the region (Stump 2010, 2013). Although their specific focus has varied, a unifying aspect to all of these studies has been their concern as much with the limits of archaeological contributions to the task of devising sustainable and resilient agricultural practices today, as on what can be learned by adopting a deep-time perspective and how this knowledge might be applied at a local, community level.
Precisely how these archaeologically oriented projects will enhance livelihoods, reduce vulnerability, and contribute to more resilient societies is uncertain as in all the above cases the research and accompanying community engagement are ongoing. Nonetheless, a specific example can help identify what might accrue as benefits. This research is being undertaken as part of a European Union Framework Programme 7 Marie Curie Innovative Training Network, entitled Resilience in East African Landscapes (REAL – http://www.real-project.eu/). The overall project focus is on the temporal, spatial and social dynamics of human-landscape interaction in East Africa over the last millennium, with particular reference to Kenya and Tanzania. A core consideration is on how societies, landscapes and ecosystems have responded to climate change both currently and in the past under different conditions, so as to better understand how they may respond to future climate change. It is intended that knowledge generated by REAL can be used to support decision makers working in East Africa when they face critical issues of rural and urban food production and food security. Specifically, REAL aims to illustrate the interplay between past human activity and natural climate variability at different temporal and spatial scales, while demonstrating the importance of considering local perceptions, narratives, and experiences of climate change in the formulation of policy responses. The key value of such data is that they can inform us about how past human societies responded under conditions of intensifying climate change to (a) increased frequency and intensity of extreme climatic change and (b) occurrence and spread of hazards. They can also help determine whether socio-economic vulnerability increased in response to heightened, climate-induced risk, while also offering insights into why particular strategies, and not others, were adopted.
One particular case concerns the historical ecology of the Lake Baringo basin, Kenya (fig. 1). Perhaps best known among the wider archaeological community as the locus of Ian Hodder’s (1982) early post-processual ethnoarchaeological studies, and possibly also as an emerging research landscape for the study of hominin evolution (e.g., Kingston et al.2007), the Lake Baringo basin is considered today as being severely degraded owing to a combination of climatic, environmental, governance, and socio-economic factors. The apparent ‘malaise’ of this environment has prompted numerous scientific studies from across the environmental and social sciences since the colonial era, and an almost equal number of recommended solutions at both practical and policy levels. Historical perspectives on these suggest that their implementation, whether during the colonial period or since independence, has only rarely enhanced overall sustainability (Little 1992; Anderson 2002).
Figure 1. Location of the Baringo Basin and sites, places and ethnic groups mentioned in the text. Figure prepared by Nik Petek, with data provided by Aynalem Degefa, based on Aster DEMs. ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA.
Particular concern is currently voiced regarding the accelerating rate of deforestation and accompanying soil erosion as inferred from changes documented on satellite imagery taken since the 1980s (Kiage et al.2007); changes in the sediment load of rivers discharging into the lake and reduction in overall lake depth over the last several decades (Lwenya and Yongo 2010); sub-catchment studies of soil erosion processes and their spatial extent (e.g., Sutherland and Bryan 1990); and palaeoecological signals recovered from lake-bed sediments and adjacent swamp cores recording catchment vegetation and precipitation regimes since ca. a.d. 1650 (Kiage and Liu 2009; Degefa et al. in press). Among the consequences of these land cover changes have been the loss of good quality land for crop cultivation and livestock herding, the deterioration of water quality, and the creation of conditions favoring outbreaks of toxic cyanobacteria (algal) blooms, all with obvious knock-on impacts for local populations in terms of public health, food security, quality of nutrition, and household economies. Efforts to mitigate some of these detrimental environmental problems have created new challenges, especially the widespread planting of Prosopis juliflora (a quick growing but alien species) to combat soil erosion (Mwangi and Swallow 2008). Coalescing around these ‘environmental problems’ are a set of related social, economic and political issues, including recurrent inter-ethnic violence, disputes over access to land and resources, conflicting land uses, constraints on income and livelihood diversification, power imbalances, and gendered labour relations (e.g., Little 1985; Greiner et al.2011; Greiner 2013; Caretta and Börjeson 2014).
What makes this current state of affairs particularly poignant is that at the end of the nineteenth century the Lake Baringo basin had abundant wildlife populations, including sizeable herds of elephants (Von Höhnel 1894) and supported a mosaic of pastoralists, farmers and hunter-gatherers (Little 1992; Anderson 2002: 23–47). These included relatively large, sedentary, populations in the Il Chamus-dominated settlements of Leabori and Lekeper at the southern end of the lake associated with a productive system of intensive irrigated agriculture (Anderson 1989). The surplus generated by this system helped feed sizeable visiting trade caravans, at times numbering over one thousand individuals, drawn to the area because of its important sources of ivory (Håkansson 2004). Pokot dominated the northern and eastern sections of the basin, as they do today, but from at least a.d. 1750 different sections had developed dual economic specialisations, with those occupying the western boundaries along the Cherangani escarpment practicing intensive irrigated agriculture (Davies 2008, 2014) alongside their Marakwet neighbours (Adams et al.1997; Davies, Kipruto and Moore 2014), whereas those occupying territories to the east and north of Lake Baringo engaged in specialised pastoralism (Bollig and Österle 2013). As argued by Davies (2008), this dual specialisation may well have enhanced the resilience of Pokot communities by offering alternative sources of livelihood and subsistence that could be drawn upon, through the mobilisation of kin relations and the bonds created by livestock loans, especially at times of environmental or political stress, such as during the severe regional droughts that occurred during the late eighteenth century (Bessems et al.2008). Looked at more broadly, enabling social flux seems to have been a common mechanism for coping with disaster among Baringo’s different communities during the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century (e.g., Little 1988; Bollig 1990), and in some settings, as among the Marakwet, remains a key aspect of their social and cultural resilience (Östberg 2014: 210) (figs. 2, 3).
Figure 2. Marakwet Irrigation: A) A typical Marakwet irrigation channel; B) Marakwet irrigated fields of maize, sorghum, millet and other crops at the foot of the Cherangani escarpment, Kenya. Photographs by Paul Lane, 2011Figure 3. Lowland Marakwet irrigation channel running through wooded farmland near Tot, Kenya. Photograph by Matthew Davies in 2011, reproduced with permission.
As noted above, detailed historical studies have identified many of the drivers of change over the course of the twentieth century that have contributed to the current state of affairs. However, there is still great uncertainty regarding how different food production systems in the previous centuries were organized, the foodstuffs they produced, and why they were capable of generating surpluses without detrimental effects on the basin’s ecosystem services. Exchange networks likely provided one means to reduce or at least offset ecological risk, but details concerning these and the range of products that circulated within and between systems are also poorly documented. Equally uncertain is whether the kind of material signalling of ethnic boundaries between Tugen, Pokot and Il Chamus (Njemps) which in the late twentieth century was related to economic competition (Hodder 1982), was also a feature of these earlier periods, or instead arose in response to widespread landscape degradation. These and comparable questions are all amenable to being answered through archaeological research of the kind being conducted under the auspices of the REAL project (Petek in press) (fig. 4). The results will not directly benefit local inhabitants. However, by identifying the key components that moderated climate change vulnerability and sustained food production in the past, and by documenting how their earlier integration has been steadily disaggregated by different drivers, it should at least be possible to establish which components might be viably revived or enhanced with beneficial effects under different socio-ecological scenarios. As critically, the very act of drawing attention to past accomplishments and successful human-environment interactions necessarily becomes a political act in a landscape that has been characterized for so long as degraded. The tangible heritage of successful adaptations and the knowledge systems associated with it, however modest this might be in comparison to those of ‘grand civilizations’, are in themselves importance resources worth protecting, and, increasing public awareness of them such as through innovative uses of social media (see Davies et al.2014a) can contribute to a greater sense of ontological wellbeing and cultural resilience. Alongside more ‘practical’ measures, these social values have a critical role to play in any society at a time of intensifying environmental pressure of the kind the world is now facing (Adger et al.2013).
Figure 4. Traces of Il Chamus pastoralist biocultural heritage. Abandoned pastoralist settlements such as these have been shown to enhance local biodiversity and survive for decades, perhaps longer, in the landscape. A) Settlement as occupied in 1950 and visible on an aerial photograph; B) The same settlement after abandonment, as visible on Google Earth ™ in 2014; C) As seen when photographed using a camera attached to a drone, November 2014; D) Surviving traces of house walls and hearth on the ground, November 2014. Figure 4a based on DOS Aerial Photos KENYA 82D / 138 / 2 photo no. 5230, reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, all other images provided by Nik Petek and reproduced with permission.
Conclusion
Writing from the perspective of their own experiences, Rockman (2012) and Van der Noort (2013) have argued that archaeologists may always have to struggle with the perception that their work is largely irrelevant, at a policy level, for dealing with future climate change. Both also argue that, nonetheless, archaeology has much to contribute if directed more modestly at addressing specific practical challenges. In line with these sentiments, in this paper I have argued that archaeologists hoping their work will help mitigate some of the hazards of the Anthropocene need to engage more fully with the insights offered not just by climate science but also those of political and historical ecology. A logical extension of this argument is the question of environmental justice, of how the results of environmental and climatic change became differently distributed over the human populations of the world and which communities have carried the burden of the “ecological footprints” of commodity consumption. Archaeologists are well versed in exploring how social and economic differences articulate with power, and how these influence control over and access to economic resources. Yet, in most of the recent archaeological discussions of the Anthropocene as both concept and reality, such issues are almost entirely absent. Curiously, there seems to be little interest in whose subsistence opportunities were most at risk in the past when temperatures or sea-levels rose and rainfall declined, whose livelihoods became most vulnerable or were most affected by increased pollution triggered by changes to agricultural and industrial production, patterns of waste disposal or the spread of different disease-bearing vectors in response to the changing contours of local and regional climatic conditions.
To my mind, a climate change archaeology devoid of such considerations, that examines changes in pollen concentrations and the nature of the sedimentary record without a consideration of whose lives these changes impacted; that evokes climatic stress without considering differential patterns of consumption or access to resources; that identifies resilience cycles, and phases of exploitation, collapse and re-structuring without a consideration of relations of social power and authority in these processes, however valuable towards enhancing understanding of the past, does little to advance our understanding of how archaeological studies might make the lives of ordinary people today any better, or help safeguard the future of the planet.
I firmly believe that archaeology has an essential role to play in climate change research in the 21st century—and that it has already made very valuable contributions to scholarly understanding of past climatic sequences, their social-ecological effects, and the differential human contributions and responses that entailed. I am not, therefore, trying to single out the work of particular scholars as examples of bad science, but simply wish to caution against making exaggerated claims that our backward looking curiosity really can help us navigate the hazards of the Anthropocene. A little less hubris seems called for, and in conducting our research we need to remind ourselves that people die when their crops fail for yet another year running and when their emaciated livestock can no longer find pasture; when their houses are struck by tidal waves, cyclones and mudslides. They die from air-borne and water-borne pollutants, and when poisonous fertilizers enter the food chain. They also die unnecessarily when resources which should have been made available to assist them during a period of environmental catastrophe or public health crisis are slow in coming or are redirected elsewhere to line someone’s pocket. No archaeological study on its own, however elegant, can change that.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University in March 2014, as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series. I am especially grateful to Professor Lynn Meskell for the invitation and to The Morgan Family Foundation for enabling my visit. I would also like to thank members of the audience on that occasion for their comments and questions, and Christian Isendahl, Kevin Walsh and three anonymous referees for their comments on a previous draft. Thanks are also due to Nik Petek for sharing Figure 4, and for his work, with Aynalem Degefa on preparing Figure 1, and Matt Davies for permission to reproduce Figure 2. Aspects of the work reported here have been funded under the European Union FP7 programme, as part of the Resilience in East African Landscapes Marie Curie ITN (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN project no. 606879). I accept full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings.
Paul Lane (Ph.D. 1986, University of Cambridge) is Professor of Global Archaeology at Uppsala University. An archaeologist with over twenty-five years’ research experience in Africa, his main interests are in the historical ecology of African landscapes, the archaeology of colonial encounters, the materialization of memory, the organization and use of space and time in pre-industrial societies, maritime archaeology and the transition to farming in Africa. A former Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (1998-2006) and President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (2008-10), he currently coordinates the Marie Curie-Skłodowska Resilience in East African Landscapes Innovative Training Network, and is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, Witwatersrand University, South Africa.
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A new model of human wellbeing is emerging to guide humanity in the Anthropocene. In essence, it recognises that wellbeing depends on enabling every person to lead a life of dignity and opportunity, while safeguarding the integrity of Earth’s life-supporting systems. The conceptual framework of social and planetary boundaries—which has come to be known as the Doughnut—contributes to this paradigm by concisely visualising its ambition (appendix), and so providing a compass for humanity’s 21st century progress.
it has been widely applied within academia, policymaking, progressive business, urban planning, and civil society as a tool for reconceptualising sustainable development.23456
Here I present a renewed and strengthened framework, based on recent advances in both internationally agreed social standards and in Earth-system science, which respectively provide the basis for establishing the Doughnut’s social and ecological boundaries.
The Doughnut combines two concentric radar charts to depict the two boundaries—social and ecological—that together encompass human wellbeing (figure). The inner boundary is a social foundation, below which lie shortfalls in wellbeing, such as hunger, ill health, illiteracy, and energy poverty. Its twelve dimensions and their illustrative indicators are derived from internationally agreed minimum standards for human wellbeing, as established in 2015 by the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by all member states of the United Nations. 7
The Doughnut’s outer boundary is an ecological ceiling, beyond which lies an overshoot of pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. Its nine dimensions and their indicators are defined by the planetary boundaries framework, which seeks to identify and safeguard critical processes that regulate Earth’s ability to sustain Holocene-like conditions, and this framework was likewise revised in 2015. 8
Between these two sets of boundaries lies an ecologically safe and socially just space in which all of humanity has the chance to thrive (appendix).
By quantifying and visualising the global scale of shortfalls and overshoot, the Doughnut acts as a concise compass for assessment of the current state of human wellbeing (the appendix contains the full data and methods).
Millions of people currently lead lives that fall far short of the social foundation’s internationally agreed minimum standards, ranging from nutrition and health care to housing, income, and energy. At the same time, human activity has led to overshoot for at least four planetary boundaries: climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and land conversion. Improving humanity’s wellbeing this century depends on eliminating this social shortfall and ecological overshoot simultaneously (figure).
The Doughnut raises four key implications for the pursuit of human wellbeing in the Anthropocene. First, it highlights the dependence of human wellbeing on planetary health. The Holocene is the only epoch in Earth’s history in which it is known that humanity can thrive. 9
The best chance of enabling a life of dignity and opportunity for more than 10 billion people over the coming century therefore depends on sustaining Holocene-like conditions, such as a stable climate, clean air, a protective ozone layer, thriving biodiversity, and healthy oceans. Second, the concurrent extent of social shortfall and ecological overshoot reflects deep inequalities—of income and wealth, of exposure to risk, of gender and race, and of political power—both within and between countries. The Doughnut helps to focus attention on addressing such inequalities when both theorising and pursuing human wellbeing. Third, the Doughnut implies the need for a deep renewal of economic theory and policymaking so that the continued widespread political prioritisation of gross domestic product growth is replaced by an economic vision that seeks to transform economies, from local to global, so that they become regenerative and distributive by design, and thus help to bring humanity into the Doughnut.10
Last, the Doughnut might act as a 21st century compass, but the greater task is to create an effective map of the terrain ahead. Thanks to ongoing socioecological systems research, this century is likely to be the first in which humanity begins more fully to understand and appreciate the complex interdependence of human wellbeing and planetary health.
I received a grant from The Kendeda Fund to write and promote my book, Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, on which this comment is based. I thank Richard King (Chatham House, London, UK) for data assistance, Christian Guthier (All is Possible, Oxford, UK) for graphic design, and Sarah Cornell (Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden), Ingo Fetzer(Stockholm Resilience Centre), Katherine Trebeck (Oxfam GB, Glasgow, UK), and Guido Schmidt-Traub (UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Paris, France) for valuable comments.
Article 13. Planetary boundaries and social thresholds: how do companies measure up? A practitioner’s perspective.http://www.article13.com Date: 2016 (accessed Feb 20, 2017).View in Article
There are diverse historical trajectories in human societies’ relationships with the non-human world. While many small place-based groups have tried to retain egalitarian partnerships with other species and ecosystems, larger societies have made major transitions. In religious terms, they have moved from worshipping female, male or androgynous non-human deities, to valorising pantheons of deities that, over time, became semi-human and then human in form. Reflecting Durkheimian changes in social and political arrangements, movements towards patriarchy led to declining importance in female deities, and the eventual primacy of single male Gods. With these changes came dualistic beliefs separating Culture from Nature, gendering these as male and female, and asserting male dominion over both Nature and women. These beliefs supported activities that have led to the current environmental crisis: unrestrained growth; hegemonic expansion; colonialism, and unsustainable exploitation of the non-human world. These are essentially issues of inequality: between genders, between human groups, and between human societies and other living kinds. This paper draws on a series of ethnographic research projects (since 1992) exploring human-environmental relationships, primarily in Australia, the UK, and New Zealand, and on a larger comparative study, over many years, of a range of ethnographic, archaeological, theological, and historical material from around the world. It considers contemporary debates challenging Nature-Culture dualism and promoting ‘rights for Nature’ or—rejecting anthropocentricity to recognize an indivisible world—for the non-human communities with whom we co-inhabit ecosystems. Proposing new ways to configure ethical debates, it suggests that non-human rights are, like women’s rights, fundamentally concerned with power relations, social status, and access to material resources, to the extent that the achievement of ‘pan-species democracy’ and greater equality between living kinds goes hand-in-hand with social, political and religious equality between genders.
The world we now inhabit is the consequence of interspecies relationships that have evolved over time. We usually think about this in terms of the scientific evolution of interactions between species and environments, shaping concomitant development. However, within this much larger evolutionary context, in which homo sapiens only emerged very recently, there is a crucial sub-category of evolving relationships: between human groups, the material environments in which they live, and the non-human beings that also inhabit these. These relationships contain diverse trajectories of development, in which changes in societal modes of engagement with the non-human world are simultaneously social, political, technical, and cosmological. Each societal trajectory is unique, and by no means as simple or linear as might be suggested by any reductive summary, but there are discernible recurrent patterns that a ‘big picture’ comparative analysis can reveal. Although this paper recognizes the limitations of larger cross-cultural comparisons, it seeks to make visible the recurrent factors that set societies on such different trajectories.
This calls for a methodological caveat. While such ‘big picture’ comparative analyses can reveal recurrent patterns in human development that are otherwise obscured by historical and ethnographic specificities, such an ambitious scope cannot realistically provide much substantiating detail within the length of a journal article. Even the related book (in press), which also rests on my long-term studies of this topic, is at best a hugely reductive summary. As an anthropologist, I am highly cognizant of the costs of sacrificing the ethnographic depth on which our theories generally rely, and the anxieties about generalizing theories that comparative analyses generate. However, a lifetime of studying human-non-human relations in multiple historical and cultural contexts has persuaded me that there are benefits in being able to discern and make visible the surprisingly consistent ways in which changes in social scales, technologies, and practices act upon religious and political ideas, and vice versa. I think that the larger patterns revealed are not only intriguing but can also contribute to our understanding of how we might compose more sustainable human-non-human relationships.
Some societies, particularly those safely ensconced in relatively remote areas, and thus only recently subjected to colonial invasions, have retained many of the features of early human societies illustrated in archaeological records. Despite the multiple and often highly disruptive effects of colonialism, and the increasing influence of being drawn into larger societies and their lifeways, they have remained small in scale, and reliant upon low-key economic practices such as hunting and gathering, horticulture, and subsistence farming. They have continued to uphold relatively non-hierarchical political structures, with cosmological beliefs that tend to be focused wholly, or at least substantially, on the worship of non-human deities. They have retained—for the most part—sustainable traditional practices, and a philosophical commitment to perpetuating sustainable environmental relations in the future.
Other societies, meanwhile, have embarked upon rapid developmental trajectories. In broad terms this has most often entailed transitioning first to larger-scale agriculture, enabling population growth, and moving on to urban developments and industry. They have exhibited increasingly hierarchical political arrangements and, having outgrown the places they inhabited originally, have often embarked upon hegemonic expansion. Their cosmological beliefs have changed radically along the way, most critically in shifting the focus of religious worship towards humanized rather than non-human ‘nature beings’, with similarly major shifts in the gender relations that religious beliefs express. In the process, they have adopted far less sustainable ideas and practices.
This paper, therefore, seeks to elucidate what these diverse trajectories have meant for human-non-human relationships, and for gender relations. Based on my own and others’ ethnographic research, and on historical and archaeological studies, it is fundamentally Durkheimian in its approach, taking as a foundational precept that societies’ cosmological beliefs and practices mirror their social and political arrangements (Durkheim 1961). It adds to Durkheim’s tenets an additional hypothesis: that cosmological beliefs are also deeply influenced by people’s engagements with the material world, and the extent to which their technological developments are aimed at imposing instrumental control over it (Strang, fothcoming). This provides us with a way to consider how, in many cases, societies have shifted from sustainable lifeways working in relatively egalitarian partnerships with the non-human world to highly unequal relationships seeking to achieve dominion over the material world and non-human species, to the extent that these modes of engagement have become exploitative and destructive.
As my use of the term ‘cosmological’ implies, I am not drawing a distinction between religious and other cosmological explanations of the creation of the world and its living kinds, or between religious and secular aims to promote particular lifeways guided by particular beliefs and practices. I would rather suggest that in all cases religion is highly political in defining and locating power and authority, and politics are permeated by religious assumptions about what constitutes proper social and material arrangements.
2. Sustainable Trajectories
It is helpful to consider the (loosely) shared characteristics of the early and remaining societies that practice what has popularly been described as ‘nature worship’, although this terminology erroneously implies a dualistic vision of culture and nature that has been imposed on them by others, and which does not reflect the holism of their own beliefs. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of the human-non-human relationships within such societies is that they make no conceptual division between human and non-human living kinds, or between human cultural life and the material world. What they envisage, instead, are relational cultural landscapes animated by both male and female totemic ancestors and non-human deities, and living kinds who, in many belief systems, shift readily between human and non-human forms. In such historical and cultural contexts, the non-human world is framed as a sentient, agentive partner in events, and non-human deities authoritatively manifest its powers. This traditional recognition of the agency of non-human beings, and their ‘democratic’ participation in the co-production of land and waterscapes, naturally inculcates respect for non-human needs and interests and encourages sustainable practices (Lucero 2018, p. 327).
There are some important variations even within societies that have retained key elements of nature worship. Smaller-scale groups, such as hunter-gatherers in Australia, Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Arctic regions, are often the most conservative, demonstrating circular economies, low-key resource use, and—along with careful population control—little impetus for expansion. An ethnographic example of just such a small-scale society is provided by my own fieldwork examining indigenous lifeworlds in Australia, where, although there are variations between the many language groups across the continent, traditional cosmological beliefs share common ground in valorising a great Rainbow Serpent, a supernatural being that manifests the powers of water (Strang 1997, 2002; Taçon et al. 1996).
This major ancestral figure is the primeval source of all of the other totemic beings that emerged from the land and water in the Dreamtime to form the world and its living kinds. Although this nomenclature suggests a long-ago creative era, Aboriginal concepts of space and time are more cyclical than linear, and the Dreamtime is generally referred to by Aboriginal elders as ‘where’ rather than ‘when’. Conceptually, therefore, it is a non-material domain that co-exists with the visible, material world of the present (Morphy 1999, p. 256). Representing both genders, the Rainbow Serpent continues to generate human and non-human life in a continuous creative hydro-theological cycle, as well as providing The Law, a body of traditional knowledge providing a template for all aspects of life. Other totemic beings are similarly non-human in form and represent both genders. Beliefs in non-human ancestral beings, and adherence to the Law, have allowed Australian indigenous people to maintain highly conservative lifeways for millennia (Flood 2010; Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999; Strang 1997).
I do not wish to romanticise early or contemporary hunter-gatherer and other small-scale societies as enjoying ideal gender equality. They typically ascribe different roles to men and women, and archaeological records and historical ethnographies suggest that, even prior to the influence of more patriarchal societies, men tended to dominate public interactions, most particularly those involving interactions with other groups. However, there are some important indicators of relative gender parity. In Aboriginal Australia, for example, property—the ownership of land and resources—is held in common by men and women alike, and all members of local clans have equal rights of access to these. Kinship lineages might be matrilineal or patrilineal, and formal marriage rules, such as a requirement for cross-cousin exchanges, entail a variety of marital arrangements in which a person of either gender might relocate to their spouse’s clan estate and kin. Aboriginal communities are gerontocratic in their political structures, being led by both male and female elders. Political status and power are conferred over time by the acquisition of secret sacred knowledge, often through key stages of initiation. Ritual practices, although also differentiated by gender roles, are carried out by both men and women to the extent that key ceremonies are typically categorized as ‘men’s business’ or ‘women’s business’.
The key point here is that in traditional place-based societies, such as those in Aboriginal Australia, substantial indicators of gender equality, including the rights of women to co-own land and resources, and to participate directly in democratic and equal decision-making, simultaneously promote egalitarian assumptions about the rights, and indeed the authority, of both male and female deities personifying aspects of the non-human world (Strang 2005). Similar indicators of equality can be seen in other societies maintaining links with longstanding hunter-gatherer lifeways, such as Inuit communities in arctic regions (Fienup-Riordan 2017), and the !Kung San in the Kalahari Desert areas of Africa (Lee 1979), whose deities are similarly composed of both genders with complementary powers.
Critically, these societies compose convivial human-non-human relationships, to the extent of assuming that there is a human obligation to ensure the ongoing well-being of all living kinds, and a commensurate responsibility for the non-human world to care for humankind. Thus, many of the rituals I have recorded with indigenous groups in Cape York have focused both on expressing respect for local ancestral beings and soliciting their generosity in the provision of resources (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Mural in the community of Kowanyama, Cape York Peninsula, Queensland Australia. Photo Veronica Strang.
Some societies, even as they settled and enlarged, retained a focus on nature religions. For example, cultural groups in Central America supported agriculture and increasing population levels with the introduction of irrigation (Scarborough et al. 2011) but continued to worship deities of either (or combined) genders in the form of feathered serpents, water lily beings, jaguars, and so forth (Ferguson 2000; Walker and Lucero 2000). In the Pacific region, Māori groups settled into horticultural production, formed larger and more hierarchical tribes, but continued to valorise serpentine taniwhas, forest beings, sky beings, and other non-human male and female supernatural deities (Barlow 1991). In parts of Asia indigenous communities also settled into agriculture, introduced increasingly sophisticated technologies, and enlarged but retained a keen sense of an animated and sentient non-human domain, as expressed, for example, in Japanese Shintoism (Lee et al. 2018), in which water beings (in the form of dragons) traditionally appear as powerful supernatural beings. However, in such cases, the processes of transition described at the outset are visible. Following societal expansions, the Mayan cosmos shifted its focus to human or semi-human deities (Diemel and Ruhnau 2000; Schele and Miller 1986); Māori blended human and semi-human gods with their forest and water beings (Barlow 1991); and across Asia, powerful dragon gods were displaced by deified human emperors (Schafer 1980; Strang, fothcoming; Zhu 2014).
3. Expansive Trajectories
Other societies demonstrated more radical transformation in the trajectories of their relationships with the non-human world. Rather than maintaining sustainable lifeways, they embarked on modes of production that led to major increases in their populations and intensification in resource use. Jared Diamond describes agriculture as humankind’s worst mistake (Diamond 1987), precisely because it sparked both of these trends, while also making increasingly instrumental changes to local environments involving land clearance, the drainage of wetlands, and the domestication and thus the prioritization of just a few plant and animal species. Enlarging societies produced more hierarchical social and political arrangements. Agriculture notably introduced greater gender inequality, both in gender roles (which became more closely aligned with public and private spaces) and through the more bounded enclosures of property that settlement required, which increasingly located land and resource ownership in male hands and lineages. Greater intensification and competition often led to appropriations and enclosures by more powerful groups, creating class structures dividing those holding land and resources from those who worked for them. Communities led by ‘big men’, ‘chiefs’ or privileged families transitioned, as their scale increased, to leadership by—most often male—religious leaders or monarchs whose primacy, along with technological developments requiring centralized governance, enabled the emergence of the nation state (Engels [1984] 1972; Hocart [1936] 1970).
Technological progression from agriculture to urbanization, along with the population increases permitted by these developments, sometimes led to societal ‘collapse’ as local environments ceased to be able to sustain commensurately high levels of resource use (Diamond 2005). Societies that depended on irrigation to support such growth were particularly vulnerable: for example, in the Indus Valley, and in Central America, rapid expansions of early irrigation societies were brought to a juddering halt by long periods of drought (Marris 2014; Scarborough 1998, p. 135).
An alternative to collapse was to rely on resources traded from elsewhere or to seize the land and resources of others. Thus, for many centuries societies were able to maintain unsustainable lifeways by importing goods or by making hegemonic forays into other territories. Colonizing explorations and appropriations were largely led by men: they created multiple inequalities between conquerors and the conquered (the latter often being dispossessed of their homelands and/or enslaved) and, with the importation of more patriarchal ideologies, often encouraged more hierarchical relations between men and women. Thus, in African colonial history, for example, indigenous women previously holding relative gerontocratic parity in terms of property and political leadership (as queen mothers, chiefs, traders), found themselves doubly disempowered, losing their economic roles and being pushed into the structural social inequalities more familiar to the colonizers (Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf 2016).
While acknowledging that this subsumes the real complexities of gender roles in earlier societies, it is fair to say that men more generally dominated the emergent spheres of engineering and infrastructure, and thus the process of exerting instrumental forms of control over the non-human world. Just as early technological advancements such as irrigation had permitted more intensive agricultural practices, so too did the invention of farming machinery, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, new industries, and new forms of energy and resource use. Just as colonial appropriation had introduced intercultural and gender inequalities, technological impositions enabling intensification in human resource use led to greater inequalities between humankind and the other species. Like indigenous human communities, non-human beings were either enslaved (by domestication) or displaced by the loss of their habitats, by the introduction of domestic crops and cattle, and by the environmental degradation caused by ‘infrastructural violence’ and exploitative practices (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012).
Changes in religious beliefs and practices came hand in hand with all of these social, political, and economic transitions, most particularly with the preponderance of male religious leadership. The form ascribed to deities was therefore transformed over time. Early societies had worshipped and propitiated multiple deities representing the powers of the non-human world—serpentine water deities, storm gods, forest beings, totemic animal beings, and so forth (Batto 1992; Jastrow 1910, pp. 71–72). However, the gods of societies bent on growth-based trajectories underwent a process of humanization, first becoming semi-human (creating, for example, the serpent-tailed nāgas of Indian religions; the sea-serpent bodied, goat-footed or horned deities of early Greco-Roman and Celtic traditions) and then wholly human in form (as, for example, with the emergent Hindu gods (Bolon 1992); and the later Greco-Roman pantheons (Spretnak 1992). Within these religious pantheons, as societies became more patriarchal, formerly powerful goddesses were increasingly portrayed as either problematically unruly, or subservient to powerful male gods. The logical destination of this trajectory was reached when each of the major monotheisms placed all power in the hands of male/father deities (Day 1985; Reeves 2004; Stavrokopoulou 2021).
4. The Emergence of the Other
The pattern of change in religious forms that asserted the rule of single male deities was, in accord with Durkheim’s thesis, concurrent with the establishment of patriarchal societies. This entailed some parallel processes of ‘othering’. Most obviously, it affected the status of women, who were recast as ‘Adam’s rib’ and infantilized by an overriding assumption of male authority (Campbell 2001). The prevailing narrative tropes for women were disapproving of independence, self-expression, or failure to be socially (or sexually) compliant. Thus, an early Judeo-Christian figure of Lilith, who proved to be insufficiently biddable, came to be portrayed in a negative (jealous, vengeful) and sometimes serpentine form (Riches 2005, p. 156), while—epitomized by the Virgin Mary—religious teaching valorised virginity, motherhood, nurturing, and obedience. The othering of women intensified in a medieval religious world that contained deep anxieties about ‘the flesh’. Women (if not virginal and virtuous) represented the temptations of the flesh and the potential corruption of the spirit, constituting a threat to social order that required authoritative containment (Galatians 5. 19–20). Misogyny was normalized to the extent that between 1580 and 1630 over 50,000 people, 80% of whom were older women, were tried and found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake (Macfarlane 1999; Pócs 1999).
A more subtle othering took place in relation to the non-human world. There was a critical process of spatio-temporal distancing: the non-human male and female deities who had previously lived in nearby rivers, wells, groves, and trees, rocks, and lakes, were simultaneously humanized and dislocated. Cosmological geographies began to place them elsewhere, for example in the lofty heights of Olympus. Thus, historians note the shifts from pre-Hellenic Bronze Age nature religions to the humanized Olympian pantheons of the Classical era (Bonney 2011; Henderson and Oakes [1963] 2020), with a related shift in the distributions of power in gender relations (Gimbutas 2011; Goettner-Abendroth 2009; Spretnak 1992).
As concepts of time became more linear in form, deities also became more temporally distant, with their creative world-making seen as a long-ago era, and salvation located in a distant future (Lippincott 1999). This spatio-temporal separation was further increased by transformations that absorbed all supernatural powers into an omniscient male God who shifted further upwards and outwards to dwell in a far-off celestial Heaven. Such spatialized relocation represented an important kind of ‘social distancing’, as it was accompanied by a sharper and more hierarchical conceptual division between humankind and the non-human ‘beasts of the field’ or ‘beasts of the forest’ (Isaiah 56:9).
Ancient religious texts present a particular view of historical contexts, offering a distillation of their dominant narratives and political arrangements. Like any system of law, they are reductive, obscuring historical and cultural variations and the contemporaneous complexities of gender and environmental relations (Stavrokopoulou and Barton 2010). However, they do serve to highlight the dominant beliefs and practices that shaped the authoritative texts of the time. Thus, in ancient Biblical texts, monotheistic origin stories, Genesis being the most obvious example, describe Man as having been created separately, in the image of God, with a clear gender division thrown in for good measure.
So, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
In such accounts, only humankind receives the ‘breath of God’, i.e., the spirit, which confers immortality in that it returns to God upon death: ‘… and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it’ (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Only humankind is seen to have consciousness and the capacity for creative thought and communication with God through prayer. Although women might be permitted to pray, religious leadership became an exclusively male domain. Being located closer to the angels than to earthly life forms, ‘man’ (with the use of the masculine pronoun throughout) is given dominion over other living kinds:
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Psalm 8.5)
Even the materiality of non-human beings is differentiated: ‘For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish’ (Corinthians 15:39).
It is through these authoritative religious narratives that the division between human and non-human, culture and nature became firmly established. There was an implicit continuum in which those humans, purportedly driven more by instinct and emotion and lacking rationality—i.e., women, ‘other’ races, or lower/uneducated classes—were deemed to be closer to nature. This further enabled racist divisions in which human ‘others’ could be seen as less than human and created the conditions for a dominant worldview in which all ‘others’ required elite, white male direction and control.
As dualistic visions of rational (male) culture, and irrational (female) nature took hold, there was a feminisation of nature that replicated expectations of gender (Griffin [1978] 2015; Plumwood 1993). In multiple impositions of the beliefs of major religions over those of conquered ‘pagans’, the non-human serpent beings that had manifested the elemental powers of water were demonised and slain (Charlesworth 2010; Riches 2005). Nature came to represent both the Holy Mother in all of her virtue or Lilith and Eve, the fallen women of the Bible. She might offer gendered compliance, with reliable and moderate water flows, rich soils to support crops, forests to supply timber, and valuable rocks and minerals to extract. Or she might be recalcitrant and unruly, withholding rain or sending it in overwhelming amounts, delivering hostile weather, offering impenetrable jungles and untraversable deserts, dangerous predators, and stinging or poisonous species. Such an ambivalent view of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Nature implies that if there is more recalcitrance than compliance, ‘the other’ must be subjugated (Condren 1989; Merchant 1980, 2010).
5. Unequal Relations
This vision, therefore, reproduced several related forms of inequality. It lent itself to colonial endeavours that dispossessed many place-based communities of their homelands and led to the enslavement of perceptually ‘other’ and ‘lesser’ humans and their labour to serve white, male masters. It led to a broader subjugation of women, whose time and labour were similarly directed into service. It established a form of anthropocentric power relations in which the world was recast as being there to provide ‘environmental services’ for humankind, thus justifying the exploitation of the non-human world via the extractive and unsustainable modes of engagement that have led to the mass extinction of species that we are currently witnessing.
A modern vision of the non-human world as something to be ‘acted upon’ was not merely religious in its form. The scientific thinking that emerged in different times and places was also influential. Even as the major monotheisms became dominant, ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman natural philosophers were seeking to understand the material properties of the world, asking questions about the elements, what they were, and why they behaved in certain ways; how human bodies worked, and how medicines might assist them; how celestial bodies related to each other and to human lives. This deconstructive thinking foreshadowed the disenchantment of Cartesian science, in which, rather than manifesting the powers of the non-human world in the form of colourful water serpent beings, water became H2O and—along with everything else in the non-human domain—a ‘material resource’ (Linton 2010, 2013). A vision of the world as being purely material intrinsically challenges ideas about animism and sentience in the non-human world, reserving consciousness and agency for dominant human elites. Such objectification is, of course, a prerequisite for exploitation, whether of women, non-human beings, or a disenchanted material world recast as a passive subject.
There are ample historical examples of how these beliefs and values are manifested in practice, but Australia, where a mere two centuries of colonial settlement has had such extreme social and ecological impacts, offers perhaps the most dramatic illustration of how quickly inter-human and inter-species inequalities can be established. Even the most preliminary colonial encounters, as European ships reached Australian shores, resulted in the killing and kidnapping of indigenous people (Flannery 1999). In the subsequent waves of exploration and settlement, such practices were expanded to constitute genocide. Indigenous Australians could remain on their traditional lands by providing free labour to the cattle industry but were only legally provided with wages in the early 1960s. With the influence of civil rights movements around the world, they finally gained Australian citizenship in 1967. Since then, indigenous efforts to regain traditional lands and resources, and greater social and political parity, have been a long and uphill struggle.
As indigenous communities in Australia absorbed the patriarchal assumptions of European settlers, along with pressure to adopt Christian religious impositions, the colonial encounter was particularly degrading for women. Since colonising efforts were largely male-led, and there were few European women in the outback, settlement was accompanied by the ‘concubinage’ of Aboriginal women, which continued well into the 20th century. Gender inequality was entrenched by State policies ensuring women’s ‘statutory subjugation’, which enabled the removal of their children fathered by settlers. There was further political disenfranchisement as settlers, assuming that indigenous communities echoed the political arrangements of their own society, engaged in negotiations exclusively with Aboriginal men (McGrath and Stevenson 1996, p. 37).
Australia similarly provides one of the starkest examples of how beliefs about anthropocentric dominion encourage exploitative environmental engagements. The introduction of hard-hoofed cattle to a continent with a delicate soil ecology; widespread land clearance, and the introduction of crop farming, was accompanied by violently asserted gold rushes and the development of extractive industries that established a heavily ‘resource based’ economy. All of these colonially introduced practices have had major ecological impacts, including widespread soil degradation and salination, and the severe pollution of waterways and marine areas. The introduction of multiple invasive species of non-native plants and animals has also been devastating to indigenous species, as has the rapid urban growth that, concentrated around river deltas, has removed many key wetland areas. Australia’s rapidly expanding coastal cities contain most of its national population, currently numbering about 25.5 million people. They also contain sizeable ports, enabling the movement of cattle and produce to nearby Asian trading partners, but involving dredging and construction that has been hugely disruptive to delta areas and to vital marine habitats.
Australia’s rapidly enlarged population also requires domestic water supplies and food. As its climate was characterised by highly volatile patterns of rainfall even before climate change exacerbated these, the response of governments and farming sectors has been to impose intensely directive water infrastructures. With a religious zeal for ‘greening the desert’, the early to mid-1900s saw the building of major dams and irrigation schemes (Hill [1937] 1958), and this trend continued as the population increased further, and global markets exerted increasing pressure for more intensive farming practices. Thousands of bores were drilled to extract water from the Great Artesian Basin to provide for sheep and cattle, to the extent that its levels have fallen dramatically, and many people living around its periphery (particularly indigenous communities in the north) have found it increasingly difficult to access potable freshwater.
Food producers also invested in on-farm water retention schemes (small dams and bunds to ‘harvest’ water), and abstracted water from rivers to the extent that flows have regularly dropped to non-viable levels (Connell 2007). In the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s major farming area, key wetlands have vanished, and millions of fish have died because low flows have led to eutrophication.1 Additionally, located in the Murray-Darling Basin are vast irrigation corporations, such as the notorious Cubbie Station which, having bought over 50 abstraction licences with the acquiescence of the Queensland Government, built a series of dams large enough to be seen from space (Figure 2). To grow thirsty and soil damaging (but highly profitable) crops such as cotton, the station annually abstracts from the river about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow southwards into the Murray-Darling Basin (Strang 2013).
Figure 2. Aerial view of Cubbie Station. Google Earth.
6. Infrastructural Relations
The imposition of water bores, dams, irrigation channels, pipes, and related material interventions provides a perfect illustration of how societies choose to prioritize human needs and interests above those of non-human beings. All such concrete infrastructural arrangements are intended to direct water into serving human aims and activities, and thus away from its normal flows supporting ecosystems and their non-human inhabitants. As Ballestero observes, infrastructures also have a non-material dimension, in bureaucratic ‘devices’ such as indices linking water charges to consumption. (Ballestero 2019).
In Australia, an important device of this kind has been the introduction of volumetric water allocations to commercial water users. Initially, these were aligned with riparian access and designed to set some limits, aiming to ensure the fair distribution of water to farmers along the course of each river. Efforts by conservation organizations to push for allocations ‘for the environment’, for example, to maintain wetlands and prevent fish kills, were largely met with debates about what constituted a ‘minimum flow’ sufficient to sustain aquatic ecosystems. However, Australia’s politics are more Conservative than conservative, and ecosystems such as the Murray-Darling Basin have continued to suffer. The situation was made more extreme in the 2000s, by the introduction of water trading. This new ‘device’ severed the tie between land and water, first by effectively privatizing water allocations that had previously merely constituted licenses to abstract specific amounts, and second by detaching them from the land so that they could be traded in a virtual water market, potentially leaving ‘dry blocks’ without any access to water.
In such a market, non-commercial organizations, such as conservation groups, can rarely compete financially with commercial players aiming to gain major profits by irrigating high-value crops. Nor can they compete politically in a system where powerful commercial interests dominate government agencies at every level. Wealthy landowners in Australia formed a ‘squattocracy’ in the colonial era, and these social networks remain powerfully influential. This firm hold on power is maintained, according to informants belonging to this group, because farming dynasties have established a tradition of ensuring that family members are elected to federal and state governments and that they also take a leading role in bodies focused on water management. A similar influence is exerted by the mining industry, as the ‘backbone of the economy’, and commercial fishers and the tourist industry are also important players. It is difficult for any non-commercial groups to challenge those able to stand on their contributions to the economy, and although conservation groups and indigenous communities strive to be heard, they are persistently marginalized, not least because they cannot afford to commit similar time and resources to being directly involved in governance.
The result is material and non-material infrastructures enabling highly exploitative practices that deprive non-human beings and ecosystems of the water that they need to sustain and reproduce themselves over time. There is now talk about ‘natural water infrastructures’ referring to aquifers, forests, or wetlands that capture and store water or regulate its flows. More often than not, these are seen as an opportunity to extend human control and access to resources by utilizing the material capacities of aquatic ecosystems, for example in storing water for irrigation, or ameliorating the effects of floods and droughts on human populations and urban areas (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Floods in Brisbane. Wikimedia Commons.
In this realm of thinking nature is still castas ‘the other’. This usefully brings home a realization that, while science has been conventionally represented as being opposed to religion, they share important common ground in a determination to separate culture and nature. Some efforts have been made to rejoin these domains. Studies of ecology have necessarily been concerned with anthropogenic pressures, and in recent decades there has been increasing recognition that cultural diversity and biodiversity depend upon each other. Efforts to establish Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) have sought to reconcile social and environmental concerns and to encourage interdisciplinary perspectives. But the emphasis has been on making connections between domains, rather than dissolving their boundaries.
This dualism also underpins environmental legislation that, echoing the disciplinary divides between the social and natural sciences, presents the non-human domain as a separate sphere of responsibility. It could be argued that environmental legislation does seek to promote and protect non-human interests and that its enactment, through bureaucratic processes, has some representational capacity to support non-human rights. However, because it remains largely dominated by visions of ‘natural resources’ as the passive subject of human decisions, it falls a long way short of providing the non-human domain with the kind of explicit rights and democratic equality that might genuinely challenge anthropocentric priorities.
In reality, most environmental legislation to date has done little more than ameliorate the most extreme effects of exploitative practices, and this is not enough to create a more sustainable trajectory for all living kinds. This is plainly illustrated in Australia, where multiple efforts to regulate water use have failed to protect the Murray-Darling Basin or indeed any of the continent’s ecosystems. The performative superficiality of much legislation purporting to uphold environmental well-being is reflected in the failure of almost all nations to achieve social and ecological sustainability, and in humankind’s collective failure to halt anthropogenically-caused climate change.
All such efforts are flawed in that they not only retain assumptions about separate natural and cultural domains, but also continue to employ the language of ownership (saving ‘our’ world), and concepts of guardianship that cast humankind hierarchically in a senior (male) parental role. In these terms, nature continues to be cast as a feminized, infantilized other, and non-human rights are only those doled out by Daddy.
7. Nature-Based Solutions
The newly fashionable notion of ‘nature-based solutions’ reaffirms dualistic visions of culture and nature and remains located within an anthropocentric view that the major objective is to utilize the material properties of the non-human world to maintain or improve its service to humankind. However, it also gives more room to an understanding that ecosystems have their own methods of regulating water flows, and that these constitute major agentive capacities. It is therefore a potentially useful point of connection between conventionally dualistic ideas about water and land management and critiques aiming to encourage a less anthropocentric stance, in which humankind seeks to understand and respect not just the powers of the non-human world, but also its needs and interests. In seeking a more egalitarian relationship, attempts to make a paradigmatic shift away from anthropocentricity challenge deeply embedded notions of human and male hierarchy and priority, as well as the dualism of a foundational concept that divides human and non-human beings into separate worlds.
As noted earlier, such dualism has long been challenged by alternate worldviews in which human and non-human beings inhabit a single world where their lifeways are not conceptually detached from one another but depend instead on a shared responsibility for collective human and non-human well-being. As indigenous communities have promoted their own beliefs and values with increasing vigour, often assisted by anthropological cultural translation, they have had a profound influence upon those groups in larger societies who seek both social and ecological justice. The close ties between early feminism and early environmentalism are often forgotten, but these movements have been hand-in-hand since the outset, underlining a reality that both are concerned with equality and critical of exploitative power relations. While civil rights movements seeking racial equality have emerged more independently, and there are multiple complex issues in their intersections with feminism and environmentalism, there is some conceptual common ground between all countermovements addressing inequality and injustice.
This coherence is most obviously the case with indigenous communities who seek not only to gain greater social equality but also to restore their traditional, more egalitarian relationships with the non-human world. In Australia, these aims are inseparable, with political enfranchisement providing the starting point for the long struggle towards regaining Native Title and an increasingly vocal critique of the exploitative practices that have devastated Aboriginal homelands (Toussaint 2004). Similar endeavours can be seen around the world, for example in the USA where, at Standing Rock, Sioux tribes have protested against the imposition of oil pipelines on their land while also—like many other First Nation groups—seeking greater self-determination and a more influential role in protecting the environment.
Indigenous activism has also taken more reciprocal visions of partnership with the non-human world into the political arena. There has been a productive exchange of ideas between culturally diverse worldviews and academic debates similarly questioning the logic of dualistic visions of nature and culture. This has also brought into question the categories of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ science that reify a foundational worldview that these are separate domains. Academic critiques of the dualistic ‘othering’ of culture and nature have therefore come from several directions. ‘Scientific’ visions of the interdependence of all organic beings and ecosystems include Vernadsky’s notion of a holistic ‘biosphere’, conceived in the 1920s (Vernadsky [1929] 1986), which provided a starting point for the notion of Gaia promoted by James Lovelock (2000), although in presenting humankind as the brains of the planet, this failed to reject the established hierarchical arrangements.
Indigenous ontologies, fully acknowledging the participation of the non-human domain in co-creating shared lifeways with humankind, have inspired many of the ideas underpinning social science theories concerned with relationality. For example, a more egalitarian vision of a single human-non-human world, conceptualized in fluid relational terms, is provided by Socio-Technical Systems thinking (STS) (Harvey et al. 2019), and other work on complex systems (Marres 2012; Savaget et al. 2019), and by Actor Network Theory (ANT), in which Latour promotes a notion of governing without mastery (Latour 2004, 2005). New materialism has brought with it a keen sense of the agentive capacities of non-human beings and things (Coole and Frost 2010), and the communicative capacities of ecosystems (Tsing 2004), as well as the ways in which non-human elements act upon the world through their material properties and behaviours (Edgeworth 2011; Strang 2014).
Greater appreciation of non-human powers has also revived a lively debate about animism and agency (Harvey 2005). These terms have excited some controversy, partly because they raise both religious and scientific hackles about definitions of consciousness and intentionality, and where and how these might be located. Acknowledging forms of agency and consciousness in non-human beings constitutes a direct challenge to the most dominant religious beliefs: that spiritual consciousness is what differentiates humankind from ‘the beasts of the field’. Similarly, ideas about ‘vital’ materialism (Bennett 2009) unsettle the certainties of a disenchanted Cartesian view of a materially passive world.
Animism has traditionally been defined as a belief that plants, animals, places, and things are enlivened by a spiritual essence or soul (Bird-David 1999). This sits readily with belief systems in which non-human beings, water, and places can be personified as non-human deities, such as the Rainbow Serpent, which generates life and imparts spiritual ‘aliveness’ to other beings and to sentient living land and waterscapes. However, metaphorical narratives of spiritual being and presence are not so far removed from more secular ideas about what is ‘alive’. While Cartesian visions of materiality fail to encompass ideas that specific places, rocks, waterways, and so forth might also be ‘alive’, and may categorize both indigenous beliefs and neo-paganism as ‘animism’, when such concepts are expressed through more abstract ecological views of ecosystems as ‘living systems’ they are not really so controversial.
This takes us into some wider questions about personhood, and the extent to which this is understood as depending on some kind of soul or spiritual essence. While monotheistic religions generally take the view that only humans have souls, this is leavened, to some degree, by their retention of a more generalized notion of spiritual consciousness (albeit located in a male father deity) that is ‘omnipresent’. The concept of ‘presence’ is helpful. It highlights the metaphorical similarity between Judeo-Christian ideas about an ever-present God watching and judging human lives, and more definitively ‘animistic’ beliefs, such as Aboriginal visions of a sentient cultural landscape imbued with ancestral beings that are similarly watching over its inhabitants and generating the laws and moral order by which they are meant to live. Another conceptual link might readily be made with emerging ideas from the cognitive sciences, about notions of extended mind (Clark 2008).
Without wishing to revisit lengthy and impassioned arguments about agency, it may be that these can be defused, to some extent, by an acceptance that there are multiple forms of consciousness and intentionality, most of which do not match the extreme reflexivity that human cognitive capacities allow. Other species demonstrably share some aspects of consciousness, such as complex social interactions and emotive responses to stimuli, and even plants seeking the light, or viruses colonizing other bodies, demonstrate forms of intentionality. Thus, consciousness might be best conceived as a continuum of diverse possibilities. Our closest primate relatives hint at some shared capacities for reflexive understanding, but humans—the cleverest monkeys—are still the extreme outliers. However, while perhaps located at the other end of the continuum, even material things, such as water, have considerable capacity to act upon the world and all of its living kinds, and to ‘behave’ in predictable ways as a result of their particular material properties (Strang 2014).
Anthropological studies of human-animal relations (Serpell 1996) have shown that most societies acknowledge non-human beings as persons, with domestic pets being most readily included as kin within families. Recent multi-species ethnographies have also considered the complex social and material interactions between other species and between human and non-human beings (Haraway 2008; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). Material culture specialists have shown how objects can be imbued with notions of personhood (Knappett and Malafouris 2008) and the idea that sacred objects, places, rivers, and so forth can personify supernatural deities is unproblematic in many cultural contexts.
Societies that see non-human species and elements as totemic ancestral beings are naturally more comfortable with wider concepts of personhood. A useful example is provided by recent Māori activism in New Zealand, which has succeeded in persuading the courts to define forests and rivers as ‘living ancestors’ (Muru-Lanning 2016). This has led to a decision to confer legal personhood on, for example, the Whanganui River, providing it with the rights and responsibilities of persons equivalent to that offered to bodies such as corporations. Similar efforts have been made to declare rivers as persons with the Ganges, and with the Atrato River in Colombia. Such rulings have been controversial internationally precisely because they transgress both Christian beliefs and established scientific beliefs, about spiritual being, or consciousness, being confined to human persons. In doing so, they open the door to an assertion of non-human rights.
8. Conclusions
Activists around the world have called for the UN to issue a declaration of the ‘rights for nature’. As with the universal UN Human Rights established in 1948, this would confer upon non-human species some basic rights to survive and be protected from extinction; to reproduce; to live safely and without mistreatment. In a complementary effort, legal activists have been pushing the International Court of Criminal Justice to include ecocide—the destruction of ecosystems, and the driving of non-human species to extinction—as an international crime (Higgins 2019).
Although these endeavours retain some problematic vestigial assumptions about a separate domain of ‘nature’, they are symbolically important, opening the door to the new thinking that, in envisaging a dynamic interrelated world, challenges anthropocentric assumptions that separate humankind from ‘nature’. Relational models, like those of more holistically integrated cultural contexts, foreground the agentive capacities of non-human beings and things and strengthen their active ‘presence’ in events. This vision of collective participation provides more promising conceptual foundations for sustainable human-non-human relations. However, the achievement of sustainability surely depends upon some form of pan-species democracy that, unlike more conventional notions of ‘stewardship’ or ‘guardianship’, advocates more equal relationships between human and non-human beings (Grusin 2015; Hinchliffe et al. 2005).
It is usual to assume that democracy requires a capacity to participate explicitly in decision-making processes. Although animal behaviouralists and certainly many pet owners might argue that ‘dumb animals’ have considerable communicative ability, there are obvious limits to the capacities of most species to represent their own needs and interests. Humans also vary radically in their abilities to articulate their needs and interests, and a parallel problem is presented by the lack of capacities of small children to speak for themselves. Models for upholding children’s rights assume that they do have human rights and that we have a collective social responsibility for protecting these rights by speaking on their behalf. In deliberative ecological democracy, non-human democratic rights are similarly upheld by the provision of effective representation of ‘those who can’t speak’ (Eckersley 2000, p. 119).
Speaking for ‘the other’ has some practical application in discursive fora (Meijer 2019), but it is not a complete solution. As Barad has observed (Barad 2007), it is difficult to maintain ontological equality between those who cannot speak and those representing their interests. Pan-species democracy requires a paradigmatic shift: an understanding that democratic participation is not merely about being ‘spoken for’. Non-human beings and the material world—and water is a prime example—are intimately involved in flows of material exchange with human beings, and with each other (Alaimo 2010; Dobson 2010). Thus, they are not passive subjects awaiting human voices to speak for them and represent their interests: they are social and material agents in themselves—co-participants in the production of land and waterscapes, and in the making of human and non-human lifeworlds (Hinchliffe 2015; Neimanis 2017). Recognizing this active co-production is a vital step towards accepting the case for non-human rights and democratic inclusion.
Once non-human rights are agreed, the question then is how to ensure that they are democratically upheld and carried into everyday practices. For interspecies political relationships that respect non-human agency, we can return to indigenous exemplars demonstrating more reciprocal ways of engaging with the non-human world. As described above, in Aboriginal Australia, non-human beings, and the non-human domain are readily acknowledged as having agency and power (Muecke 2007). The immediate presence of authoritative non-human ancestral beings permeates all decision-making processes, such that conserving resources and protecting future generations (human and non-human) is integral to indigenous models of ‘caring for country’.
In larger societies, we need more explicit mechanisms that ensure that non-human needs and interests are voiced in the composing and enactment of laws, and in decision-making processes. How, in practical terms, can non-human beings and ecosystems be included in pan-species democratic processes to the extent that their rights are properly represented and balanced in relation to the fulfilment of human needs and interests? How is it possible to achieve an ethical and sustainable balance in the distribution of costs and benefits?
A useful representational model is provided by New Zealand’s bi-cultural decision to extend rights to forests and rivers. The case of the Whanganui River led to the formal establishment of a role in which members of the local iwi (tribe), who regard the river as their living ancestor (Te Awa Tupua) are elected to represent and ‘speak for’ the river in all decision-making and legal fora. An appropriate gender balance in this role was also achieved, in the first instance, by the election of a woman and a man with appropriate expertise and experience to carry a joint responsibility for representing the rights of the river (Strang 2020).
Building on this model, I have proposed elsewhere a concept of ‘re-imagined communities’ in which the idea of imagined communities (Anderson 1991) is extended to include the non-human domain (Strang 2017). This wider inclusive vision provides a non-anthropocentric starting point that relocates humankind within the world and extends notions of equality and democracy to all living kinds. Thus, in river catchment management, rather than decisions being dominated by commercial or political interests, both human and non-human rights and interests would be democratically represented by a diverse group of people with appropriate expertise (social scientists, biologists, geologists, botanists, etc.) who would not have a direct conflict of interest in the outcomes.
There is no single formula as to how this might be arranged: various permutations—councils of elders, catchment expert groups—could be appropriate in different social and cultural contexts. However, there are some key ingredients. These representatives would have a clear appreciation of the role and agency of the non-human domain in co-creating a shared lifeworld. They would provide diverse expertise about a strong cross-section of non-human species, and about the material world—the soils, the hydrology, and the geology—within the river catchment area. They would have a remit to articulate non-human needs and interests in decision-making processes, and they would seek outcomes achieving a sustainable balance of human and non-human rights and interests. This suggests that all representatives—speaking for human and non-human participants—should have some parity in the process and that the composition of such groups should also be founded on principles of equality and diversity, most particularly with a remit to strengthen the inclusion of women in leadership and decision-making.
An approach underpinned by principles of parity and partnership has implications both for gender relations and for human-non-human relations. It has Durkheimian implications for the religious and secular belief systems underpinning social action. It must be hoped that, with gender parity, with a non-anthropocentric worldview, and with robust pan-species democratic representation of ‘other’ living kinds, it will be possible to achieve more sustainable modes of human-non-human engagement.
Note
1
Lack of sufficient oxygen in the water, due to algal growth.
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Gustavo Magallanes-Guijón3*
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 
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