Pachamama and Public Policy

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Last week I was in Washington DC at the annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA 2013). This year’s theme was the social contract, and I was a discussant for a panel looking at how conceptions of the social contract influence the politics of nature.

The panel was entitled Naturalizing Social Contracts: Environmentalism, Extraction and Non-Human Subjects in the Andes and Amazon, and was organized by my good friends and colleagues Maria Elena Garcia and Jose Antonia Lucero (Indigenous and Latin American Studies, respectively, and both at the University of Washington, Seattle). The panelists were all experts in the North Andean countries of Columbia, Peru and Bolivia, and shared wonderfully insightful papers. Along with Maria Elena and Tony, there was Angelica Bernal (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Bret Gustafson (Washington University, St. Louis), and Patrick Wilson (University of Lethbridge).

I must admit that I am appalling ignorant about Latin America and this region in particular. Indeed, I suspect my invitation was an effort by my friends to rectify that a bit! And I am glad they did. I learned so much through my background reading, the panelist’s presentations, and the conversations we had. I hope to learn much more.

One theme that stood out in my mind is the role “Pachamama” plays in the politics of animals and nature in this region.

Pachamama is a concept with spiritual roots in Aymara, Quechua, and other indigenous religions and cultures of the area. Often translated as “mother earth” (better, mother Kosmos), Pachamama is regarded as the source and protector of life and living systems. Amongst other things, Pachamama is a spiritual way of explaining why all people, animals and nature have an intrinsic moral value in and of themselves.

Many of our panelists rightly noted how such a concept can be used to green-wash destructive extractive industries and marginalize indigenous peoples in the creation of public policy. After all, if nations recognize the principle of intrinsic value in nature, then their policies and practices must per force align with and protect the more-than-human world. Right? Well, it turns out to be a whole lot more complex than that, as well-meaning ethical sensibilities must compete with extractive primary industries (e.g. mining, oil development, logging, industrial agriculture) and the local and global elites who benefit from them. More, they are sometimes use to wall off critical questions about political ecologies, justifying environmental destruction in many places because some other places are “protected”.

Fair enough.

Even so, I was powerfully struck by four other considerations.

First, when it comes to policy discourse, Pachamama is used to justify and defend the intrinsic value and legal standing of animals and non-human nature in public policy. I spend much of my time training first world policy advocates, scientists and decision makers that ethical concerns about people, animals and nature are both necessary and good for public policy. This if frequently met with skepticism and resistance. What I would do to have a policy principle like Pachamama written into the US Constitution, as it is in Bolivia through its Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth!

Second, you can understand Pachamama in a literal spiritual sense, or as non-literal and ethically figurative metaphor. Personally, I respect those that believe ethics has spiritual roots, but understand Pachamama as a metaphor that speaks to non-anthropocentric traditions of normative ethics. However you approach it, it represents an enduring lesson for the global north and globalizing south from indigenous traditions about how we ought to live with the non-human world. And it fundamentally challenges western and non-western approaches to ethics that instrumentalize and commodify others, human or non-human, as means to an self-serving ends. As a global society we have done such damage to the “fourth world”, and ignored for too long what that body of traditions has to teach all of us.

Third, it undercuts the notion that sustainability is what promotes the indefinite well-being of humanity. Rather Pachamama sees the fates of people, animals and nature as intertwined. This is more than a causal insight about feedback loops in environmental goods and services. It is a moral insight that how we live with other people and other animals, in the broader milieu of the natural world ,bespeaks our ethical commitments to do right (or not) by ourselves and others. It showcases that our geographic agency — our ability to do good or ill to the living systems of the earth itself — is both a question of science and ethics. Those who look for sustainability to be created through technological, neo-liberal, or any other reductive means are fundamentally misunderstanding what it will take to create a sustainable world.

And finally, Pachamama demonstrates that animal and environmental ethics are not simply abstractions of a white, western and privileged elite that are disconnected from real issues facing people the world over. No, all public policy is ‘ethics writ large’. Pachamama makes manifest what is only latent in other contexts — that our policies about society or animals or nature are always steeped in ethical meaning and significance, and if we want the best policies possible, then we will have to forthrightly address their ethical roots and fruits.

To learn more about one expression of Pachamama, see the The Pachamama Alliance, or follow your nose from the Wikipedia article.

Image. Mariela de la Paz. 2001. The Toad 2. In Perla Alejandra Regla and Adolfo Molina. n.d. Pachamama. From the, Periodistas Creativos blog.

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