Plenary session POLLEN 2024: Anwesha Dutta

POLLEN 2024 

Monday 10 June, 2024

Towards a just and plural futures in a world marred by social ecological crisis and restrictions on flow of material, money, and people. Ironically, the field itself is embedded within many of these inequities and structures that it seeks to contest and topple.

I think of political ecology as a process and practice of engagement realized through evolving relationships with capital, technologies, communities, and nature.

What has been gaining ground in the last couple of years within political ecology are discussions around decolonization of knowledge, of engagements and praxis. Political ecology (PE) both shapes and is shaped by the structures and practices of academia in a reflexive manner. However, many of us engaged in PE within academic settings are embedded in powerful, white supremacist, capitalistic and colonial structures. These systems sometimes expropriate the emotional labor and experiences of people of color to perhaps enhance the status of so called progressive white individuals and privileged academics, who, might not be white themselves, but also benefit from a white supremacist system. 

 Then it can become an exercise in bourgeoise decolonization, there is that risk!! Because I see this as a quest to resolve the contradiction between our identities as enemy of privilege and the reality that, educationally, culturally, and often economically, we are privileged.

I say this also to make a twisted argument of sorts, I have been inspired by a lot of phenomenal Indian sociologists, subaltern scholars and environmental historians who have made substantial contribution especially towards highlighting that unlike in the west where environmental movements were started by scientists, in India it began organically through protests by local peasants and that environmentalism was driven by survival rather than leisure, also work that drew out the entanglements between nature and nation. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that many of these Indian scholars wrote primarily in English, found widespread recognition by and in the western academy and were most likely to be Brahmins or upper castes, with significant intellectual and cultural capital and benefitted from colonial  and post-colonial structures. But India has hundreds of vernacular scholars, journalists and activists that have produced similarly crucial body of work, but the politics of language and caste just doesn’t allow for their visibility. My intention with this is to provoke deeper reflection on whose knowledge we prioritize in our efforts to decolonize and embrace plural ontologies.

In this particular moment in time the academy itself is embedded in violence, instances of which are galore through suppression of pro-Palestinian protests with armed police personnel on campuses.

We are in many ways trained to immerse ourselves in questions, concepts, and contradictions. But is it truly worth spending so much time identifying the most relevant concept to address the socio-ecological crisis of our times? Especially when some of it might be engaging in the poetics and politics of ´word salad´. This is where we slip into consumption rather than transformation.

Yet another longstanding debate requiring reconsideration is that we are great at revealing, analyzing, at being reactionary and vigilant to rising global socio-ecological challenges, but how do we transform these into sustained long-term actions? Clearly this constant body of empirically grounded knowledge we produce is not just a means to an end exercise. I should also point out that many of us here are part of extremely powerful spaces as like the IPCC and IPBES but as Rob Fletcher’s recent book pointed out that a neoliberal centered approach to solving socio-ecological challenges will continue to fail forward despite its ineffectiveness, because it is geared towards symbolic and material interventions in the name of environmental action and security.  To move towards a just and plural future we must start with the self and the structures of power and coloniality we are deeply entrenched in and benefit from.

This also lays bare some of the inherent contradictions of doing political ecology, the praxis of it, that we need to account for in relation to our positionalities, for me it starts with residing in a Petro state and my research is being indirectly funded through profits from fossil fuel, and that right now we are here in Sweden , a country that is yet to offer rights of self-determination to the indigenous SAMI people.

I would also like to raise a bigger question, what is the political economy of political ecology, in theory and as a community of practice? The systems we are embedded in expect of us to generate money through unrealistically competitive grants, publish relentlessly (to line the pockets of profiteering publishing houses) to be or not be awarded tenure, spend extended periods of time in the “field” doing immersive research and continue to be engaged , where “engagement’ is a measure of the mental, emotional and physical commitment/struggle toward a particular goal”, and in PE that goal should aim at changes in practice or policy to improve the situation of people and landscapes, also could be by actively participating in (and not just studying) social ecological movements. We are constantly having to navigate systems of colonial legacies and capitalistic efficiency that continue to exploit us as well.

PE is in this critical juncture requiring a balance between realism and utopia (and it’s a thin line), as Jevigney Bluwstein and Salvatore Rosa seem to suggest that capitalism will not double down under its own contradictions and if anything turn into something worse…i.e. usher in a situation of climate and eco-apartheid, yet we are also presented with a political ecology future of degrowth, a call to action that envisions an economic system prioritizing ecological sustainability, over continuous economic growth alongside convivial ways of biodiversity conservation. For nature itself works through principles of reciprocity, balance and exchanges.

Now where do I place myself and the work I do and always acknowledging that there is no “firsting” in research and that I take refuge in the banal and every day, where life happens and the web of life is situated, I do this intentionally to avoid metaphors that squash the everyday and reduce it to monocrop. This is primarily shaped through my training and education in Social Work at the masters level where I was trained in doing “action research” , meaning the outcome of the research project should bring about some change however miniscule or at least “shake” even hyper local institutions and structures.

Linked to that is my desire to do “simple and plural” political ecology, with coherent messaging that is deeply powerful. I say this, because Political ecology has mostly been reactionary in its approach and that has also led to some in the field asking if we have reached a point of saturation… our response to that has been also reactionary with explosion of writing , but can we really keep this pace or do we even want to or rather we call for a PE agenda towards transformative action, from reaction to being proactive?

Given that our  solid, shared but concrete identities and the contexts we inhabit shape our epistemic positions and interactions, I want to highlight an emerging area of my work and how I became involved in it. During my master’s studies, I focused on radical social work with a focus on Dalit and tribal issues. During my studies I was introduced to the Roma people in Europe who migrated “westwards” atleast one thousand years ago and continue to live on the edges of the European society facing deep socio-ecological and political discrimination. Two years ago, during my first visit to eastern Slovakia, I was warned about the “gypsies” being thieves, with derogatory terms like “blueberry,” “mushroom,” and “timber mafia” associated with them. One day while hiking with my white Slovak family, I encountered a group of Roma women and children who greeted me warmly and started a conversation. I did not speak their language, so I mentioned the incident to a Slovak social scientist friend. She explained that the Roma were happy for me because they thought I had “made it” with a white Slovak family and looked like one of them. Through several interactions afterwards also with local NOGs, I began to understand their intricate relationship with nature. In eastern Slovakia, most Roma are marginalized to the edges of villages and often live in deplorable conditions with restricted access to the forest and natural resources they have historically depended on. Long story short, I got in touch with the brilliant George Lordachescu who has worked on and with Roma communities particularly through the lens of ecological justice and together, we are organizing a panel on the Political Ecology of Roma Environmental Vulnerability in Europe at THIS POLLEN with Roma researchers. I see this as the start of a research activism project embracing diverse and plural ontologies.

Another example from my research is related to this project on displacement ecologies that seeks to understand the long duree relationship between ways in which displaced people influence their environments and vice versa in Afghanistan with case studies in Kabul. As part of the project together with the Norwegian Afghan Committee, a group of Afghan scientists and the Taliban government we organized an event on Climate Change adaptation in Afghanistan involving several international donor agencies including the World Bank and European Commission, Afghan NGOs and CBOs and making sure to have representation from Afghan women.

The aim was to bring political ecology into actionable agendas, using climate and environment as an avenue for international engagement with Afghanistan. Our research indicated that the aid flowing into Afghanistan was ineffective and worsening socio-ecological distress, with an urgent need for investments in agriculture, water, energy sectors, and strengthening of local institutions, requiring both monetary and non-material support.

Despite our “succesful” engagement, I felt deeply uncomfortable given the Taliban’s repressive regime and its ruthless suppression of women’s rights. In conversations with Afghan researchers, both men and women, we were confronted with a critical question: would boycotting the Taliban mean abandoning the community and turning our backs on the 40 million people still living in Afghanistan or should we sit with the trouble and navigate the interstices of power and justice? The question I ask is, what do these positions require of us? Are we always in a position to choose?

And finally… We are not here to convince each other because we will most likely not bring the colony down from academia. Perhaps it is time to set a political ecology agenda to bridge research, advocacy and action, while on a personal level I continue to challenge status quo while being restricted by immigration laws, visa regimes and border walls.

It can start in the academy!!!