Lubna Alli

This week’s readings on the role that nature plays with the land and the people provide useful insight on the role that nature, the environment, and the land plays in the discourse around ownership, access, and fundamental rights. This discussion is further championed by a discourse around private-public control, the idea of the land grab, and the issues surrounding identity politics. Ojeda and González’s paper provides a strong case for these issues concerning legitimacy of identity as it concerns legitimacy to rights and land ownership. The marginalization that Afro-Colombians, Indigenous, and peasant populations face in Colombia speaks to the resource politics that ensue as a result of it. These relational and situated manifestations of power in relation to the land continue to reproduce at a systemic level where it is stated in government legislation that peasants are not considered ethnic subjects in official multicultural discourse in Colombia. This not only speaks to a very violent blanket statement use of the word multiculturalism, but of the continued othering, excluding, and de-legitimizing of a significant group of people. The ongoing dispossession by process of privatization and enclosure, as well as by the proletarianization of peasants and their incorporation in development projects, speaks to a much larger issue at a national and international scale. Major contributors to this problem include the USA and various multinational corporations who continue to fund projects that trickle down into the hands of responsible groups such as FARC and ELN. How, then, do we save nature? And, is it far fetched given the current state of affairs? 

the political ecology rooted in productions of nature hold environmental concerns in tension with social, cultural, and political economic considerations

This idea of whose nature and whose space is one that Cindi Katz explores in her reading, arguing that the political ecology rooted in productions of nature hold environmental concerns in tension with social, cultural, and political economic considerations. This has been a recurring problem identified with the Ojeda and Gonzalez reading, as it states that despite knowing that the ones best equipped to take care of the land are the peasants, the state still continues to push these political, social, cultural and economic tensions both among the people, within the state government, and between private sector corporations. This performative environmentalism, continues to overlook the deeper rooted issues for the sake of clout for ruling class land owners. Who, then, has rights to determine the “appropriate” use of preserved land? These questions seem to be cyclical and never ending, and perhaps the answer is within the cycle itself. How can we rework this framework to incorporate on the ground actors, to avoid the continued violence, to break the cycle from within? 

Sources:

Cindi Katz. 1998. Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the ‘Preservation’ of Nature. In Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. Edited by Bruce Braun and Noel Castree.  London: Routledge. 18 pages.

Diana Ojeda and María Camila González. 2018. Chapter 6: Elusive space: Peasants and resource politics in the Colombian Caribbean. In Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice: Rethinking Parks and People. Edited by Sharlene Mollett and Thembela Kepe. London: Routledge. 18 pages.