Stewardship over ownership – because land is a not an asset

Dakota Access Pipeline: Protesting for Climate Justice

2016-2017

North Dakota, USA

A coalition of Indigenous and climate protesters who build a protest camp to defend lands threatened by the construction of an oil pipeline

Context

Large oil corporations routinely displace Indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for industrial extraction and piping. Around 2016, for instance, plans were announced for the construction of a pipeline to connect the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota with southern Illinois, USA. The proposed pipeline would cross beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, destroying natural ecosystems and cultural sites including sacred burial grounds.

Practice

When construction of the North Dakota Access Pipeline was announced, hundreds of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people gathered at Standing Rock. They set up a camp and recruited others. By the end of the year, thousands of Indigenous protestors were joined by allies from environmental campaign groups, social justice movements, and the press. The protest gained increasing positive media attention with the hashtag #NoDAPL spreading on social media. Resonating with protests worldwide against corporatisation, institutional racism, and climate damage (Occupy, BLM, XR), #NoDAPL’s challenge was timely. The camp proved that a seemingly powerless grassroots organisation could attract thousands of supporters and sustain itself.

The camp based its organisation principles on practices of mutual-aid, interdependency, and responsibility in a system of Dakota and Lakota cultures that exists since before colonial settlement. A rallying cry at the protests was “water is alive” or “water is life” (“Mni Wiconi” in Lakota), signifying the protestors’ understanding of natural elements such as water as being animate and worthy of respect, in contrast to the US government-backed oil corporation’s extractive approach to nature as an inert and lucrative resource for the taking. Standing Rock and other areas in the North and South Dakota region contain Native American Reservations, to which Indigenous peoples have historically been confined, and into which white Americans have trespassed in search of gold and other natural resources. #NoDAPL was not simply about protesting the construction of a pipeline, it was also an opportunity to expose centuries of massacre, forced displacement and assimilation, structural impoverishment, and cultural prejudice against America’s Indigenous populations.

The story of the North Dakota Access Pipeline Protests is an unresolved struggle between grassroots politics and corporate power. The camp used familiar occupation and protest methods, including blockading paths for construction machinery.¹ They also faced familiar methods of oppression, such as militarised policing. Though the camp and protest nominally failed, and the pipeline, built in 2017, continues to operate, the protest is remembered for its rallying cries for intersectional justice which garnered widespread support and forwarded important agendas of decolonisation and climate justice.

Notes

1
Amongst many other examples of land-based environmental camps and protests are: the Sanrizuka Struggle (Japan, from 1966) where farmers and other activists protested against the construction of an international airport at Narita; the Larzac Struggle (France, 1971-81) in which farmers prevented the construction of a military base; Zad (Zone à défendre) (France, 2009) in which protesters diverted the French government and the construction firm Vinci’s plans to construct an airport; and Rojava (Syria, from 2016) where the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) was established as an eco-socialist, direct-democracy political system in which women play a prominent role through decentralised governance.

Black Dirt Farm Collective: Ecological land rights

2014-present

Maryland, USA

A collective formed with the dual purpose of returning land to Black farmers, and Black farmers to the land—combining the politics of land rights with an ecological sensibility, supporting legislation, and advocating for linking decolonisation and climate action

Context

“Over 12m acres of Black-owned land has been stolen in the last century.”¹

Black farmers only own around 0.5% of the total farmland in the USA, largely due to the systemic racism of farming subsidies. This inequity dates back to the legacy of giving “land subsidies to white settlers, one of the initial catalysts of societal inequalities enacted almost 160 years ago, [which] reverberate to unconscionable land access and ownership realities today”.² The number of Black farmers in the USA dropped from nearly 1 million in 1920 to just over 35,000 in 2017. The exploitation of Black people and of land ran in parallel throughout the 20th century, particularly as Black farmers lost land to large-scale industrial farming ventures, which in turn meant environmental degradation. For Black Dirt Farm Collective (BDFC), these two forms of exploitation are inextricably related.

“To be a returning-generation farmer means to revalorise our cultural identities and spiritual consciousness in service to our visions of a liveable planet.”³

Practice

The Collective has its hub on a 9.7-hectare farm in Maryland, describing this farm as “an engine for Black cooperative economic development”.⁴ The Collective’s members however, who identify as a “returning generation” of Black farmers seeking land taken from them, are scattered across the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA, from Detroit to North Carolina.⁵ Together, members advocate for the healing of both land and farmer communities. They draw from principles of “Afroecology”, a term derived from “Agroecology” that advocates social-ecological transformation as an intergenerational and political process to re-evaluate

“sacred relationships with land, water, air, seeds, and food while valuing the Afro-Indigenous ways of knowing and centring the struggles of the Black experience in the Americas”.⁶

Following this principle of social-ecological transformation, members combine a focus on food sovereignty with a larger project to achieve self-determination and solidarity. Through training and education programmes based around Afroecology, the Collective seeks to transition from an extractive to a regenerative economy. This transition is inseparable from one that undoes societal and racial injustices belonging to an extractive industrial system responsible for the production of climate breakdown and biodiversity crises.

Central to the Collective’s work is the question of land and how to return it to Black farmers through legislation. So far, tackling this question has produced The Justice for Black Farmers Act, filed in 2020. If passed, this Act would issue land grants to Black farmers through the same legal procedure that prioritised white farmers historically.⁷ The Act explicitly links Black farming to climate stewardship practices, reinforcing the link encapsulated in the Collective’s name, “Black Dirt”, which reflects both the re-appearance of healthy, lively, organic soil, and the place of Black people within farming contexts.

Through these practices in education, organising, and legislation, the Collective seeks to move away from a profit-driven industrial economy to one that is mutually healing of both land and community. Though locally situated, the Collective’s planetary understandings of climate and influences from diasporic cultures and histories of enslavement infuse its work with global resonances. Under an umbrella of decolonisation and anti-racism, the Collective simultaneously defends human and more-than-human ecological rights.

Notes

1
Shakara Tyler, ‘Farming out Loud’, RSA, 27 June 2022 <https://www.thersa.org/comment/2022/06/farming-out-loud> [accessed 15 August 2022].
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Farmer’s Footprint, ‘Xavier Brown | The Black Dirt Farm Collective’, YouTube, 21 February 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHWEXelj6SA> [accessed 15 August 2022].
6
Tyler, Farming out Loud.
7
Chuck Abbott, ‘“Justice” bill would transfer up to 32 million acres to Black farmers’, Successful Farming, 20 November 2020 <https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/justice-bill-would-transfer-up-to-32-million-acres-to-black-farmers> [accessed 31 January 2023]; ‘Booker Leads Colleagues in Reintroducing the Justice for Black Farmers Act’, 26 January 2023 <https://www.booker.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/JBF Section by Section 11.16.20.pdf> [accessed 31 January 2023].

Mietshäuser Syndikat: Community-Owned Housing

1992-present

Freiburg, Germany

Cooperative for the joint acquisition of houses that are transferred to collective ownership in order to create long-term affordable housing and space for initiatives outside the market

Context

In the 1980s, many cities in Germany were undergoing large-scale urban redevelopment, which often involved the demolition of existing housing and the displacement of low-income and socially marginalised communities. This led to widespread protests by groups including the anti-gentrification movement, which challenged this policy and demanded that the government take action to protect the rights of renters. Alternative housing models such as cooperatives and Community Land Trusts (CLTs) offer a critical response to market-driven approaches to housing and urban development.¹ These alternative models seek to transform housing from a commodity into a collectively owned social good, in which access to safe, secure, and affordable housing is provided and individual profit made impossible.

Practice

The Mietshäuser Syndikat (apartment-house syndicate) was formed as one of these alternative models for housing. It is a network of apartment houses across Germany whose members act as self-organised communities. They keep rents affordable to encourage long-term community-building and solidarity in resistance to land and property speculation. These ideas emerged in the 1980s and the syndicate itself was established in Freiburg in 1992. By 2022, the syndicate includes 177 self-organised apartment houses and another 17 initiatives currently in the process of finding, building, or buying a house.

Each project is an independent GmbH (private limited company) that includes two shareholders: the house community and the wider Mietshäuser Syndikat. The house community decides everything from wall colour to selecting new residents. However, the syndicate has the right to veto the sale of a property, thus ensuring that the property no longer functions as an exchange value. The underlying logic of the scheme is that houses should be communally owned, not by an individual person or group, such as a private or commercial landlord, or governmental institution.²

The syndicate increases its impact by providing support, legal advice, and assistance to existing and potential housing cooperatives, organising events and common activities, and advocating for more sustainable housing practices, such as energy efficiency and renewables. It also advocates for changes to housing legislation, such as the introduction of rent controls, to ensure that tenants and homeowners have more secure rental agreements.³

Their focus on using existing buildings rather than demolishing and building anew has promising environmental implications for reducing carbon emissions and material waste. Additionally, by prioritising the use value over the exchange value of housing stock, the syndicate promotes a socially sustainable approach to housing aligned with principles of the circular economy.

Notes

1
Sabine Horlitz, ‘Housing Beyond Profit: A Comparison of U.S. and German Alternative Ownership Models’, AGI (29 June 2012) <https://www.aicgs.org/publication/housing-beyond-profit-a-comparison-of-u-s-and-german-alternative-ownership-models/> [accessed 23 October 2023].
2
Judith Vey, “Antinomies of Current Marxist- and Anarchist- Inspired Movements and Their Convergence”. Capital & Class 40, no. 1 (2016),pp. 67.
3
For more on these and other strategies, see: Ivo Balmer and Tobias Bernet, “Housing as a Common Resource? Decommodification and Self-Organization in Housing – Examples from Germany and Switzerland”, in Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market, ed. by Mary Dellenbaugh, Markus Kip, Majken Bieniok, Agnes Müller, and Martin Schwegmann (Berlin, Munich, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2022), pp. 178–95 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9783038214953-012>;Anna-Sophie Schneider and van Hove Anna, ‘Mietshäuser Syndikat: Wie Hausvereine bezahlbaren Wohnraum sichern’, Der Spiegel (20 February 2018) <https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/mietshaeuser-syndikat-wie-hausvereine-bezahlbaren-wohnraum-sichern-a-1186974.html> [accessed 23 October 2023] and Wolf Sören Treusch, ‘Das Mietshäuser Syndikat: Veto-Recht Zum Kampf Gegen Wohnungsspekulanten’, Deutschlandfunk Kultur (16 July 2018) <https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/das-mietshaeuser-syndikat-veto-recht-zum-kampf-gegen-100.html> [accessed 2 February 2023].

Langholm Initiative: Reviving Lands, Nurturing Communities

1994-present

Langholm, Scotland UK

A community development trust that has purchased 5,200 acres of land, creating a nature reserve as part of a wider economic regeneration project that breaks up large estates formerly owned by private landowners

Context

Enclosure—the conversion of common land into private property—has had a profound impact on both rural landscapes and the lives of the people who lived and worked there. In the medieval period in the UK, local communities used common land to graze livestock and grow crops, harvest timber from woods, and share water resources such as streams and wells. Over time, however, the increase in population and the growth of towns and cities exerted pressure on this land. To meet the growing demand for food, and to generate more income from the land, landowners began to enclose the land—by constructing physical barriers such as walls and fences, and by establishing legal property rights.

The process of enclosure accelerated in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the growth of the wool trade, when landowners forcibly evicted tenant farmers and began to convert large areas of common land into sheep walks. This was reinforced by a series of government acts authorised by powerful land owners and aristocrats, culminating in the General Enclosure Act of 1801, which divided and privatised the remaining common “wastes” such as fens, marshes, heathland, downland, and moors. Rights of access were stripped away from tenant farmers, and landless cottagers lost access to common pastures. Enclosure maps, in particular, were important instruments for organising and controlling land, and they reflected and strengthened the power of those who created them.¹ The rural landscape was transformed, with fields, hedgerows, and woods being replaced by large, open fields and pastureland.² Today, the legacy of enclosure can still be seen in the British landscape, with large areas of private farmland and the decline of biodiversity and natural habitats.

Practice

Around 2,300 people in Langholm, a small town in Dumfries and Galloway, came together in 1994 to address the issues of land use and biodiversity loss in the area, which is one of the most intensive sheep-farming regions in Scotland. Langholm experienced a significant recession in the 1990s as the textile and coal industries began to decline, and many residents moved away in search of work. The initiative was focused on restoring the natural habitats and ecosystems that have been impacted by centuries of human intervention and promoting sustainable land use practices. Their goal was to buy Langholm Moor, “one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch”.³ The area encompasses around 10,000 hectares of land and is known for its rich natural beauty and diverse wildlife including a mix of farmland, forests, ancient woodland, and wetlands.

In 2021, the Langholm Initiativesuccessfully raised the funds to purchase around 2,100 hectares of land and put them back under communal ownership. This community buyout was a historic moment for Scotland’s land reform movement and paved the way for the creation of the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve aiming to establish rewilding practices at huge scales and regenerate the biodiversity of the area. Currently the initiative has launched their campaign to purchase further 2,000 hectares of land, planning to plant new areas of native, broadleaf woodland and aiming to create a wilder landscape that provides a rich mosaic of habitats, allowing a wide range of wildlife to thrive.

The Langholm Initiative’s community buyout brought the land back under communal ownership, allowing the community to exercise stewardship over the land and make decisions about its use, preventing future possible developments driven solely by profit motives while preserving the cultural and historical heritage of the area. This is an important tool for community-led development and sustainable land use, as it empowers communities to shape their own future and protect their natural resources for future generations.

Notes

1
Roger Kain, John Chapman, and Richard Oliver. The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales 1595-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2
Harriett Bradley. The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001).
3
Severin Carrell, ‘Scottish Villagers Plan to Buy out Landowners for Eco Moorland Project’, The Guardian, 25 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/25/scottish-villagers-plan-to-buy-out-landowners-for-eco-moorland-project-langholm> [accessed 3 February 2023].

SoLaWi: Practicing Solidarity Agriculture

2012-present

Cologne, Germany

A non-industrial agricultural network of private households that covers the production costs and receives harvest yields in return. A transparent partnership between consumers and producers that adopts sustainable agricultural practices and creates bi-directional relationships around food production, distribution, and consumption

Context

Controlling global food markets and seeking increased profits for shareholders, large corporations pay for products, not labour, and therefore discourage smaller-scale farms, many of which grow diverse rather than monoculture crops. As a result, agricultural skills and related cultural knowledge pertaining to land and ecology are lost to large-scale industrial processes, and ecosystems are damaged by over-intensive methods of extraction.

Practice

SoLaWi (Solidarische Landwirtschaft) is a German network of farms operating with methods of ecological and social solidarity developed as a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) system. CSA ensures a direct partnership between farmers and co-farmers (SoLaWi’s term for consumers) where members pay a monthly fee that covers the labour of the farmers.

Started in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s through a ‘teikei’ (cooperative) system of direct distribution, the practice of paying farmers for their labour resisted an increasingly mechanised and chemically intensified form of agriculture then underway in Japan. Cooperative principles foster mutual understanding of food and labour whereby both producers and consumers provide labour and capital to grow food and support their own delivery system.

The concept was introduced to Switzerland in 1978 through the cooperative Les jardins de Cocagne (Schlaraffengärten) and to the US in 1985. In Germany, the first SoLaWi was created in the late 1980s around Buschberghof, a Community Land Trust in northern Germany. These cooperative ventures all focus on the principle that the costs of running a farm are shared amongst the community, with each household pledging to support what it can, in return for fresh produce.

Since these early initiatives, more than 400 solidarity agriculture communities have been created in Germany forming the SoLaWi network. Functioning as a grassroots democratic organisation, SoLaWi provides support and resources to both farmers and consumers, promoting the dissemination of solidarity agriculture by identifying farming as a shared social and ecological responsibility.

Members also run educational programmes in food and crop varieties and share production methods and costs. Disseminating the combined social and ecological importance of local production and solidarity-based economies, SoLaWi presents a vital model for facing climate breakdown and its implications for food, water and land distribution. Prioritising situated knowledges, skills, species of crops, and solidarity, Community Supported Agriculture presents a lasting alternative to exploitative agribusinesses that is capable of translating to many regions and contexts as a global network of local infrastructures.

Quilombo: Fugitive Autonomy and Stewardship of Land

Established mid 17th century

Hinterlands of Brazil

Settlements formed by enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations

Context

The slave trade devastated the lives of at least twelve million people forcibly taken from Africa to work on plantations in the Americas, from the 16th to the 19th century. An estimated 40% of enslaved African people were sent to Brazil until the country abolished slavery in 1888. Many enslaved people came from Angola, their labour forming the economic backbone of Brazil.¹ As many as twelve enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil for every one in North America, to work in gold mines and on sugar plantations. This was brutal work which is estimated to have killed between 30% and 50% of enslaved people within five years.² Many enslaved Africans escaped plantation and mining operations and fled to the Brazilian jungle, some joining Indigenous peoples, and forming hybrid settlements known as Quilombos or Mocambos.

Practice

These fugitive communities endured for decades, in some cases centuries, protected by Brazil’s dense forests and large rivers. Quilombo (meaning “settlement” in the Angolan language of Kimbundu) encapsulates a way of living that challenges Eurocentric models of social cohesion and order by acknowledging the importance of memory, embodied experience, and collectivity. People in these territories came together over a struggle against oppression, and their groups sometimes included Indigenous Brazilian peoples who lost their territories to colonial land grabs for mining and plantations. The practice of Quilombo not only resisted slavery, it also practiced careful stewardship of the rainforest. This practice redefined territory as a place of care and conviviality rather than fixed, private property.³

Perhaps the best known example of Quilombo is Quilombo dos Palmares, which was founded in the mid 17th century and covered 10,000 square miles in Brazil’s north-eastern coastal mountains.⁴ It was initiated by Aqualtune, the daughter of the King of the Congo. Like many other Quilombo communities, Quilombo dos Palmares was formed and governed by women and included more than 20,000 people, making it the largest anti-colonial settlement in Latin America.⁵ Although the site was destroyed by Portuguese forces in 1694 and is currently a memorial park, more than 5,000 Quilombo settlements have survived and still exist in Brazil.

In recent years, Quilombos have become recognised as cultural and political entities in Brazil, and some communities (Quilombo dos Palmares, Campina Grande, Quilombo do Jambu) have received formal recognition and support from the government. The Brazilian Constitution recognises the rights of Quilombo communities and their ancestral territories as territories of collective property. This constitutional development has helped secure Quilombo lands and cultural heritage. However, many Quilombos still face challenges, such as land disputes with non-Indigenous communities, environmental degradation, and limited access to basic services such as healthcare and education. Quilombos’ connected forms of woman-led leadership, land stewardship, autonomous organisation, and self-reliance have enabled them to resist external threats, protect their lands and resources, and become adaptive to changing conditions. In addition, Quilombo practices of sustainable land use have helped protect biodiversity and preserve ecosystems in Brazil, forming a critical contribution to climate breakdown. As the Black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimiento summarises, Quilombo constitutes “a complex politics of and for life”.⁶ Nascimiento’s description points towards the important work that Quilombos have done in living within, against, and beyond imposed conditions of exploitation. Today, looking at Quilombos past and present, we can learn important lessons about the connection between colonial practices and climate breakdown, and how forms of care for community and land can confront and counteract the hostile environments that have been imposed upon them. When less than 5% of the world’s population comprises Indigenous people, and yet these people care for about 80% of the planet’s biodiversity,⁷ learning from practices of land stewardship and autonomous organisation as exemplified by Quilombo and Quilombo-Indigenous coalitions is paramount.

Notes

1
Jose Joao Reis and Flavio dos Santos Gomes, ‘Quilombo: Brazilian Maroons during Slavery | Cultural Survival’, Cultural Survival, 2010 <https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/quilombo-brazilian-maroons-during-slavery> [accessed 19 December 2022].
2
Charles C. Mann and Susanna Hecht, ‘Where Slaves Ruled’, National Geographic, April 2012 <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/maroon-people> [accessed 19 December 2022].
3
Abdias Do Nascimento, “Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative.” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 11, no. No. 2 (1980), pp. 141-78; “Quilombo: Brazilian Maroons during Slavery | Cultural Survival.” [accessed 19 December 2022].
4
Paula Ramón, ‘Their Identity Was Forged through Resistance: Inside the Lives of Brazil’s Quilombos’, National Geographic, 14 March 2022 <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/their-identity-was-forged-through-resistance-inside-the-lives-of-brazils-quilombos> [accessed 19 December 2022].
5
Juliana Streva, ‘Quilombo, Concepts and Repertoires of Living Together’, RePLITO, 2021 <https://replito.pubpub.org/pub/knowledge-archive-quilombo/release/1> [accessed 3 July 2023].
6
Christen Smith, Archie Davies, and Bethânia Gomes, “‘In Front of the World’: Translating Beatriz Nascimento”, Antipode, 53.1 (2021), pp. 279-316 <https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12690>
7
Gleb Raygorodetsky, ‘Indigenous Peoples Defend Earth’s Biodiversity—but They’re in Danger’, National Geographic, 16 November 2018 <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-> [accessed 3 July 2023].

Zapatista Caracoles: Meeting Places for Many Worlds

1983-present

Chiapas, Mexico

A decentralized community in Chiapas, Mexico, considered the most significant recent agrarian movement by Indigenous communities, they embrace territory as a network of relationships and prioritize a situated alternative to dominant patterns of living, decision-making, and place making

Context

“The voices of Indigenous people in Mexico have been either passively ignored or brutally silenced for most of the last five hundred years. Indigenous lands and resources have been repeatedly stolen and the people themselves exploited under some of the worst labour conditions in Mexico. The official policies of the Mexican state have been largely oriented toward assimilation, with only lip service given to the value of the country’s diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage.”¹

Chiapas is one of the richest states in Mexico and yet it is also home to some of the poorest people in the country. Chiapas is abundant in natural resources and agricultural land and yet, in 1994, research showed that more than half of the population lacked access to drinking water and school education.²

In 1994, Mexico signed up to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which enabled large-scale ownership and ranching by foreign companies. This devastated the livelihoods of small-scale farmers through land dispossession and polluting agricultural and industrial practices.

Practice

The Zapatista movement of Indigenous Mexicans emerged in response to this devastation. The movement officially began in eastern Chiapas, but followed decades of widespread political reorganisation occurring across Indigenous communities since the 1960s.³ The Zapatistas demanded official legal recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples and improvement of living conditions. They argued for autonomy as a collective right, and called for self-governance of their territories and resources.⁴

From a Zapatista perspective, territory is not a defined physical space but is formed through relationships. Communities (pueblos) comprise flows of communication, negotiation, and confrontation between individual and communal needs, and a person’s sense of self is attuned to the larger scale of community.⁵ Communities gather at meeting places which also serve as seats of government. Called Caracoles, these meeting places are named after the word for snail, because their social structure spirals outward into the community and environment in a form that resembles a snail’s shell.⁶

Central to the history and collective memory of Indigenous Mexicans is the struggle to return to land stolen by colonial conquest. Colonial land dispossession, and the imposition of property and ownership continued more recently in global trade agreements such as NAFTA, run counter to Indigenous understandings of land stewardship. The Zapatista movement points out the perversity and violence of owning nature by describing it as being akin to owning one’s own mother.⁷ Understanding nature as exceeding any possibility of objectification and ownership, and as being irreducible to human-centred ends, the Zapatista movement encourages ecologically careful systems of agriculture, and extends this understanding of respect to systems of governance, for example, by maintaining equitable gender relations within communities and leadership. Being aware and respectful of others, both human and more-than-human, the Zapatistas construct what they refer to as “A World Where Many Worlds Fit”.⁸

Notes

1
Harry M. Cleaver, “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric,” Journal of International Affairs 51, no. 2 (1998), pp. 621-40.
2
International Service for Peace [SIPAZ], ‘Chiapas Peace Process, War Process’, SIPAZ.org, January 2002 <https://www.sipaz.org/proceso-de-paz-proceso-de-guerra/?lang=en> [accessed 1 November 2022].
3
Neil Harvey. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham; London: Duke UP, 1998).
4
“[We call for the formation of] a political force that does not aim to take power, a force that is not a political party… A political force that can organize the demands and proposals of the citizens so that those who govern, govern by obeying.” EZLN, Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Forest, Chiapas, January 1996.
5
Zeynep Gambetti, “Politics of Place/Space: The Spatial Dynamics of the Kurdish and Zapatista Movements”, New Perspectives on Turkey 41 (2009), pp. 43-87 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0896634600005379>
6
Richard Stahler-Sholk, ‘Time of the Snails: Autonomy and Resistance in Chiapas | NACLA’, NACLA, 25 September 2007 <https://nacla.org/article/time-snails-autonomy-and-resistance-chiapas> [accessed 15 November 2022].
7
Gustavo Esteva, ‘The Zapatistas and people’s power. Multiversity: United States Chapter’, 1997 <http://vlal.bol.ucla.edu/multiversity/Gustavo/Zapatistas.htm> [accessed 1 November 2022].
8
See Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

Indigenous University: Weaving Bio-cultural Knowledges

2018-present

Aponte, Colombia

A decentralized network of various sites across the entire territory, facilitating river-learning, forest-learning, and chagra-learning in research gardens, and creating a place for dialogue between imposed and situated knowledge, a “pluriversity” safeguarding the rainforest and its communities

Context

There are more than 115 different Indigenous peoples in Colombia representing a rich cultural diversity. This diversity is not reflected in Colombia’s education system, however, which bears traces of colonial structures brought to Colombia by Catholic missionaries at a time when Europe invaded Indigenous communities to access minerals, gold, and rubber. An example of the colonial structuring of education is its clustering of higher education in cities. Indigenous populations in rural areas are either excluded, or forced to leave their way of life to migrate for higher education.

Practice

Facing this accessibility issue and recognising it as symptomatic of a larger marginalisation of Indigenous cultures, in 2009, the Inga Peoples of southwestern Colombia published a document called This is How We Walk with Our Knowledge (Chasam Munanchi Puringapa Nukanchi Iachaikuanawa). Itfocused on education and asked: what kind of people do we want to be? How can education help us protect our culture and territory?¹ Through extensive participatory meetings across the Inga community, members founded their own university, an Indigenous University based on the Andean philosophy of buen vivir (good living).

Following buen vivir, the Indigenous University aims to restore relations with multiple communities in the wider region, which stretches from the Andes to the Amazonian lowlands, while acting as stewards for nature. Aiming for sovereignty of education, language, and territory, the initiative draws from a long history of resistance to the violence of guerrillas, paramilitaries, criminal gangs, and state-led industrialism.

Over the last 10 years, delegates from eight Inga territorial zones have worked in a committee to design a comprehensive educational curriculum and to establish primary and secondary schools for each territory. The committee worked with academics, artists, and architects in order to achieve a contemporary and “pluriversal” scope to its provision. As Hernando Chindoy, the Inga’s legal representative, explains:

“It is important that imposed knowledge and our own knowledge practices have a space for dialogue. And I don’t see this dialogue in any other context than what is called university, although with time this name will also have to change. Later on, you can say that it is a pluriversity.”²

The University is not centralised around one campus but spread throughout the territory in a constellation of meeting spaces. Its dispersed location helps foster the University’s core focus: stimulating ongoing dialogue about environmental and territorial issues as a kind of weaving together bio-cultural knowledges. The Inga’s media collective, Ñambi Rimai, also furthers this dialogue through films and media education initiatives that focus on the situated, embodied knowledge that Inga elders pass on from generation to generation. Alongside an emphasis on ancestral and spiritual knowledge, the University also harnesses scientific approaches to monitor its natural reserves and microclimates. Outreach is equally important: the University conducts exchanges with students, organisers, architects, and artists, from Colombia and abroad, to promote its strategy for buen vivir and self-sovereignty. It welcomes students of all ages, so long as they enter the University prepared to maintain the Inga language, customs, and respect for nature. Highly localised in its situation, yet global through its outreach, the Indigenous University presents an alternative to dominant models of higher education through its profoundly ecological and social grounding.

Notes

1
Ursula Biemann, Santiago del Hierro, Álvaro Hernández Bello, Giovanna Micarelli, Juliana Ramírez, and Iván Darío Vargas Roncancio, ‘An Indigenous University’, The Architectural Review, 7 September 2022 <https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/an-indigenous-university> [accessed 8 November 2022].
2
MOULD, ‘Climate Conversation with Hernando Chindoy’ <http://mould.earth/conversations-cc> [accessed 7 November 2023].

Accumulating Control

Modernity has always attempted, conceptually and operationally, to impose order on an unruly world to better control it. The accumulation of control within the realms of politics and economics leads to a stifling of situated and canny actions. Against such restrictions, some of the most productive and poignant climate-facing initiatives start out precisely through critiquing and resisting monopolised systems of control. Centralised systems and normalised values of control further exclude exactly those alternative voices that are needed to face multiple crises.

Exploiting Land

Many related forms of exploitation play out upon land, harming ecological and social systems by abstracting them for financialised profit-making. Land speculation transforms space into privatised territories and denies people access to viable land for self-sustainment. Carbon-intensive practices including aviation and construction are incentivised and greenwashed when land is used as a carbon sink to offset emissions. In its intentional abstraction, land is removed from its original state as part of a natural system, and its exploitation contributes to climate breakdown. Revitalising the understanding of land is necessary, seeing it as the living matter of soil and not as a commodity.

Economy

The orthodoxies and operations of the capitalist economic system are major drivers of climate breakdown. Growth, as a purely economic measure and profit for the benefit of the few is pursued irrespective of nature’s limits and planetary boundaries. The beyond-human world is treated as a site to be economically exploited. Architecture becomes a pawn in economic trading, and with it architects the handservants of capital. To avoid the most devastating effects of breakdown, other diverse economic models, ignored by dominant economic theories, need to be brought to the surface. Climate justice necessitates a re-evaluation of what constitutes value, and the introduction of other measures of growth, which respect the rights of all humans and beyond-humans. Enacting distributed, shared, and ethical economies engenders new social, and so spatial formations, all of which have implications for architecture.

Land

Land is fundamental to life on earth, and yet this existential dependency is overwritten by the way that modernity treats land conceptually and operationally. Land’s political, ecological, and cultural conditions shape the lives of those living on it. Enclosed, privatised, and financialised, land only serves the profit of the few. Logged, fracked, and polluted, land is wounded and depleted. The colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands is closely tied to related exploitations of resources and people which contribute to climate breakdown. Against land’s abstraction and commodification, architecture needs to engage not just with what goes onto the land, but the conditions of land itself. Understanding the ecological value of land as soil is part of more emancipatory forms of spatial practice. Acknowledging land as a living being, as a vibrant entity that sustains life with rights of its own, engenders a more holistic approach.

Policy

Policies at a national, regional, and local level frame and thus determine action in relation to climate. Often attributed to elites, policies are criticised for their ineffectiveness, narrow focus on single issues, and tendency to reinforce the status quo through risk management approaches. Climate-related policies are more effective as relational devices that cut across disciplinary, political, and conceptual boundaries, consistent with the relational conditions of climate. This suggests the need for policies that are beyond partial fixes and expose the conditions in which things are made, as a form of analysis as well as future projection: policies that are informed by activism, a concern for Gaia, the rights of nature. Bringing policies back to their original roots in citizenship as means for collective betterment is crucial, particularly given that the lack of effective climate action is tied to democratic deficits. This is why citizens assemblies, practices of participatory governance, and other forms of redistributed decision-making become central to more equitable climate action.

Capitalism in the Web of Life

Jason Moore

Architecture is Climate

Sarah Bovelett

Anthony Powis

Tatjana Schneider

Christina Serifi

Jeremy Till

Becca Voelcker

Stewardship over ownership – because land is a not an asset