Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up at multiple venues across the city of Toronto under the theme “What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.” I recommend reading some of the documents from the Biennale to get a sense of how they do this.
Visiting the biennale has inspired me to continue formulating my “manifesto in progress” (see here, here, here, and here for a few earlier glimpses). Manifestos aren’t the place to be comprehensive or to explore internal contradictions, of which there are many, so this one is obviously formulaic. It is presented on the hypothesis that formulas can sometimes be helpful for orienting ourselves.
Ecologize + Decolonize -> Reindigenize
To dwell sustainably on this planet, humans will need to recover from an era of extractive-capitalist colonialism, with its massive overproduction of harms to communities of humans and nonhumans, and of wastes and toxins inassimilable by the present (Holocene) Earth system. This recovery proceeds along three parallel and interrelated lines.
(Note that the “->” arrow sign is intended to be something between a plus sign, an equals sign, and a Shift sign, indicating a forward momentum in a convergence of the other two.)
Ecologize
1. Ecology is the study of the dynamic interrelationships between and among living beings and their environments. It informs both the possibilities and the vulnerabilities by which we sustain our collective lives within the real, material places making up this Earth.
2. Societies that dwelled sustainably in particular places dwelled ecologically by way of their traditional ecological knowledges and practices. Societies that did not dwell sustainably can and have begun to relearn the principles of ecological living through the modern ecological sciences. Traditional ecological knowledges and contemporary ecological science complement each other in informing how to live in specific places. As in the past, each of them today is a work in adaptive progress.
3. To live sustainably, in an ecological sense, requires ecologizing the economy, so that economic decisions and processes no longer exceed the capacities of ecological systems (which requires decarbonizing and deplasticizing, among other things); ecologizing politics, so that political decision-making is brought to appropriate socio-ecological scales; and ecologizing culture, so that human activities, motivations, and beliefs are brought into greater resonance with ecological realities.
Decolonize
1. Colonization is the process of “taking over.” Plants and animals colonize available environments; people have done so for millennia. Colonization can take many forms, some “softer” and including elements of commensalism, mutualism, and cooperation, and some “harder,” as with violent imposition onto others. Colonialism is the –ism of the colonizer; it is the belief, ideology, and practice of colonization as a totalistic political project by which the colonizer seeks to conquer and vanquish or assimilate the colonized.
2. The last five centuries have featured colonialism on a global scale, beginning as an economic, cultural, and biopolitical project by European imperial powers and continued today primarily in economic and cultural forms. This colonialism has been articulated as “modernization,” which has brought benefits as well as costs. These have been unevenly distributed due to their embeddedness within colonial and capitalist power relations: at one end, the benefits have been amassed into fortunes by global elites; at the other, the costs have been borne as cultural genocide, dispossession, and new forms of economic and cultural slavery (including addictions to soul-destroying substances and distractions). Somewhere in the middle, the benefits and costs have been distributed in workable variations for the global middle class, but as the climate and ecological debts have gotten more pronounced and less deniable, the benefits have been diminishing, the scramble for them intensifying, and class status becoming more precarious.
3. Economic colonialism today makes it nearly impossible not to participate in competitive, extractive-capitalist economies with their uneven distribution of risks and benefits. Cultural colonialism today makes this participation seem desirable. It is a colonialism of image, lifestyle, fashion, and mentality, promoted by systems of advertising and marketing encouraging consumption of goods representing an identity and way of life that is inconsistent with long-term ecological sustainability and social justice.
4. Decolonization means shedding colonialism physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It means decolonizing science and knowledge, politics, and culture. Metaphorically speaking, it means standing up straight and resolutely facing what colonialism has brought, what preceded it, and how its effects are to be contained and nullified. Decolonization brings a new respect for what preceded colonization (to the extent that it is known and accessible), but whatever preceded it can at best only guide, not condition and constrain, what will follow. A decolonized life is a newly open life.
Reindigenize
1. Reindigenizing means becoming indigenous once again: that is, learning to be “from” one’s place, “with” one’s place, “rooted in” and “given over” to that place. Globally speaking, that place is Earth, which we must collectively learn to “live within” and not just at the expense of. Locally speaking, that place may or may not be well defined. This places a premium on processes of “coming to know one’s place” — one’s environment(s), one’s ecoregion(s), and those who know them from deeper and more embedded histories of entangled relationality.
2. Reindigenizing therefore means revaluing indigenous knowledges and practices and honoring indigenous communities and their representatives (where such communities exist). This requires, first of all, supporting processes of reckoning with and reparation toward those communities — processes that will “unsettle” land and the property relations that have captured it. This will take persistence, struggle, and creativity, as land (considered as property) is in many ways the basis of the colonial system, and as the past is not easily exhausted by anyone’s particular narrative of it.
3. Reindigenizing also, ultimately, calls for processes by which the options for indigeneity can be expanded for all. At the very least, such reindigenizing means becoming better citizens and denizens of our places. More substantially, it means developing new models for citizenship and denizenship appropriate to the ecological realities of place (a.k.a. land). This is a long-term project, to be approached with caution and care, by which humans will envision new commonalities, redraw relational networks, and learn to become kin with each other and the other others that together make up our Earthly homes.
4. Ecologizing and decolonizing combine to create a move toward reindigenizing at local scales and newly indigenizing at a global scale — that is, at becoming “earthbound,” in Bruno Latour’s words (with Latour’s own insights radicalized somewhat through an “expanded account of militant agency,” as Martin Crowley puts it).
