The Where In The Who
The Fight For The Sense Of Place In Two Cases Of Environmental Injustice
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis, 1:28
From the Old Testament to the current discourse on climate change, the nature/culture dichotomy has been a pillar of Western thought. We have taken the ontological exceptionality of the human race for granted. From that, we have extended our dominion over the land and the sea, always understanding ourselves as aliens to the ecosystems we exploited.
In doing so, we have lost the where in the who we are. Today, our identity is place-less. Nature and the landscape are no longer part of it. They are the mere backdrop to the play of human history. The same goes for our spirituality and religion, a de-localized endeavour with no ties to the place.
There are, however, sheltered in the deepest jungles and in the harshest deserts, people who understand ecosystems as a whole, and themselves as part of the whole. People whose spirituality and ethics include their environment. Let’s consider, for instance, this passage:
“We bow to sacred Lake Baikal, which preserves its waters in crystal purity. We pray to our gods, who chose as their places of earthly habitation the splendid palaces of the powerful Sayan Mountains.”
(Zhukovskaya, 2009, p. 165).
And this other one:
“The Delta is more than our home and more than a pilgrimage — it’s our identity. We live off this land.”
(Ossenbrink, 2021).
The nature/culture dichotomy is erased. In fact, the land is not a passive background from which to extract natural resources. It is part of their identity, culture, and spirituality.
Among the aboriginal people of Australia, poems, songs and myths are tailored around the landscape, the patterns of the seasons, the plants and the animals. Their spirits dwell in specific locations, such as mountain peaks, waterholes, or groves. Their poems follow the morphology of the hills, their culture is inseparable from their land. In other words, they inhabit their place.
Whereas, if we eradicate culture from the place, we lose the possibility to truly inhabit it. “There are many people on the planet who are not inhabitants” (Snyder, 1995, p. 184). These different conceptions of our role in the ecosystem lead to tragic misunderstandings. When a wealthy corporation offers indigenous tribes ingent sums of money to move them off their land and make space for deforestation or oil drilling, these often refuse. And for us their refusal is irrational, because we do not know what it means to belong to one place. In fact, we rarely belong anywhere. Thus negotiations go on, bids are raised in an effort to buy a piece of land. And people resist because their land is not just their land, it is who they are. You cannot buy that.
However, more often than not, they have to give up their forests, mountains and rivers. Because they are poor or marginalised, or they lack jobs and means of sustenance. In other words, because unequal power hierarchies interfere with the control over natural resources. This is, at its core, what we call environmental injustice. I argue that environmental injustice is what happens when someone with no understanding of what it means to inhabit one place confronts someone whose very identity belongs to the land.
From Russia to Namibia
In 2002, Russian petroleum company YUKOS planned the construction of an oil pipeline between the Siberian city of Irktusk and Daqing, in China. The pipeline would cut right through the Tunka National Park, where the Buryats, the second largest indigenous group in Siberia, live in harmony with nature off traditional husbandry, hunting and gathering (EJ Atlas, 2022a). Local Shamanist and Buddhist indigenous leaders joined forces against the project to protect their sacred groves, pilgrimage sites and the fragile ecosystem of Lake Baikal, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a hallowed ground for its original inhabitants.
In January 2021, Canadian oil firm ReconAfrica started test drilling in the Kavango Basin, at the border between Namibia and Botswana. An oil development in the area would not only harm the Okavango River Delta, the last habitat of numerous endangered species and itself also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but would threaten the traditional way of life and local knowledge of the indigenous San people. The San organised marches and petitions to protest the plan, drawing the attention of international media and of various environmental justice groups (EJ Atlas, 2022b).
Facing off in the Russian Republic of Buryatia and in the Okavango Delta, in the form of oil developments against indigenous’ protests, are two contrasting worldviews. One implies a culture/nature dichotomy. The other understands humans and nature in an inseparable connubium.
Beyond subsistence: the meaning of the land
In both cases, attempts have been made to negotiate the terms of land usage between the oil companies and the original inhabitants. However, businesses and governments involved have understood the people’s attachment to the land only as mere economic reliance. There is more to that, and that is why all offers to relocate have been rejected.
For the San people of the Kavango Basin, the oil development would prevent them from accessing their religious sites. One such example is the Tsodilo Hills, a sacred rock paintings complex in Botswana, where the San gather for pilgrimage and offerings. Even though the site was excluded from the drilling licence after pressure from UNESCO, it would be surrounded by oil infrastructure. The area, according to one indigenous leader, means for the San people “what Mecca means to Muslims” (Ossenbrink, 2021). Their lore and local knowledge would be irreparably compromised by the oil development, and so would be their sense of place.
For the Buryats people, Lake Baikal and the mountains surrounding it are the sacred residency of their spirits. The Buryats still practise an undiluted form of shamanism, based on the cult of nature spirits, which strongly connects them to the landscape. The pipeline would cut right through the Ukaan Khada and Uulyn Tyeebyee mountains, sites of worship and sacrifice for their original inhabitants. The dramatic contrast between the violence of the oil development and the care for the ecosystem of the locals is epitomised by this passage from a petition launched by shaman leaders:
“During pipeline construction our sacred places will be disturbed. Places, where it is forbidden not only to touch or move the stones, but also to break the smallest branch. Such sacred places can be found on the top of each mountain, and spirits — the masters of such places — will be angry with people disturbing their peace.”
(EJ Atlas, 2022a)
Environmental injustice happens as a result of a misunderstanding. Western firms and governments have embraced the nature/culture dichotomy, and when faced with indigenous holistic views, they have failed to accept them. Leveraging on the economic marginalisation of rural people, they have deforested their identity and bulldozed their spirituality. The loss of sense of place is irreparable for the San, the Buryats and the other thousands of indigenous communities engaged in an underprivileged fight to preserve their connection to the land.
At the same time, oil development contributes to perpetuating colonial hierarchies by placing an extra burden of CO2 and adverse climate on the shoulders of vulnerable minorities in the developing world.
Despite widespread criticism, investments in fossil fuels continue. One latest example is that of the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a proposed oil development project between Uganda and Tanzania. Environmental justice organisations have already started protesting across the world, particularly in France, since French oil giant Total is among the promoters of the plan (StopEACOP, 2022).
There is, however, one ray of hope. Given the growing awareness on the effects of fossil fuels, countries and institutions are pledging to divert their investments towards renewable energies. This has the major consequence of making fossil fuel investments less profitable, and thus less desirable. Last year, the European Investment Bank committed to stop funding loans for coal, oil and gas projects. The same has happened for various national governments, such as Denmark (Ibid.). Phasing out from fossil fuels is a way to address both environmental and climate justice at once. Halting oil developments would preserve the environment and the way of life of indigenous communities worldwide; reducing fossil fuel burning and consumption would prevent global warming from reaching a point of no return.
We can truly fight for environmental justice only if we include the environment in our ethics. It is only when we overcome the nature/culture dichotomy that we understand ourselves as part of a larger, balanced whole, and thus act to protect it. Sympathising with the indigenous communities in their struggle for their sense of place requires that we trace our sense of belonging to the land back to our etymology. “Human” comes from the latin word homo, which shares the root with humus: earth, soil, ground. The Western-dominated discourse on environmental justice is still too far from acknowledging the importance of this bond between who we are and the land we inhabit, and our role as just a small part in the order of nature. In Rachel Carson’s words,
“Man’s attitude towards nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. […] But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
Bibliography
EJ Atlas. (2022a). Buryatia (Tunka National Park) vs Yukos oil, Russian Federation. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/buryatia-vs-yukos-oil-russian-federation
EJ Atlas. (2022b). Oil and Gas Exploration in the Kavango region threatens San People and Endangered Wildlife, Botswana-Namibia. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/kavango-oil-botswana-namibia
Ossenbrink L. (2021, April 22). Namibia: Indigenous leaders want big oil out of Kavango Basin. Al Jazeeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/4/22/namibia-indigenous-leaders-want-big-oil-out-of-kavango-basin
StopEACOP. (2022). https://www.stopeacop.net/home
Snyder, G. (1995). A Place In Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. Counterpoint.
Zhukovskaya, N. L. (2009). Heritage versus Big Business: Lessons from The YUKOS Affair. Inner Asia, 11(1), 157–167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23614941
