To: Retort
[Massimo sends this dispatch from the frontier of extraction - the Yasuni region of Amazonia, the planet's most biodiverse spot. IB]
I am in Ecuador at the moment, where I arrived with my family 6 days ago for a three months trip in Latin America. I have just come back from a conference on the Yasuni area of the Amazon, where in the last 30 years, petroleum enclosures have been threatening the common land of the Waorani and some of the last indigenous peoples still living in isolation in the Amazon. We learn that there is no clean oil exploration, that the amount of toxic by-product — even in the case of no spillage — is enormous and very difficult to handle, with toxic consequences for sources of fresh water and all forms of life depending on it. Around the wells used to search for oil, the percentage of oil in the soil was so high as to be 20 or 30 thousands times above the maximum level for safe agricultural production.
The aim of the encuentro was to try to counter the ambiguity of the Ecuador president Correa who in 2007 offered a plan that Ecuador will not allow extraction of the ITT oil fields in Yasuní, if the “world community” can create a compensation trust to leave the oil permanently in the ground and fund Ecuador’s “sustainable development” into the future. I leave aside here the fact that in the recent versions of the proposal this “compensation trust” was substituted by a marketisation of the Yasuni in terms of carbon credit bonds, a mechanism highly criticizable not only because carbon credit markets have been found ineffective in meeting the need of carbon reduction and because they tie the resources destined for social and ecological ends to speculation, but also because they threaten the autonomy of the indigenous people over their territory, since carbon bonds requires the local indigenous to act in the interest of the “monetary value” of the Yasuni carbon bond in competition with all carbon bonds issued around the world.
However, apart from the carbon market replacing the compensation trust, Correa seems to want to master a literally incredible juggling exercise. On the one hand, he declared that no further oil exploration will be undertaken in the Yasuni area, while on the other hand and at the same time, he is signing permits for further exploration. I asked around, and the reasons given to me for this contradiction are various, ranging from the fact that he is a very whimsical man, passing through the effect of the oil lobby, and arriving at the fact that the plan was never his in the first place, but belonged to the economist Alberto Acosta, who originally proposed the plan and since then he left the government. (Acosta was at the encuentro, and a very critical voice, calling for a moratorium on all oil exploration, invoking the new constitution, claiming the movement project as a life project not only for the indigenous or the Ecuador people, but for the entire planet, since Amazonia is the source of water for the rest of Ecuador and Yasuni has the greatest biodiversity in the world). But maybe this juggling is really the manifestation of the fact that to coopt the commons one needs to leave the options open, so as to navigate the contradictions and jump in the moment opportunity arises.
| “The country is yours, power is yours” |
The project of commons cooptation seems to me quite evident walking around the city of the encuentro — Orellana — and the nearby city of Coca — a dusty oil town, the gateway to the Yasuni park. They are both covered in posters that invite citizens to think of their city, their country and their resources as theirs. Posters like “your resources, we handle them well”, or “the country is yours, you have the power” seem to show that wanting to instil a sense of “common ownership” is clearly important from the state/oil companies propaganda’s side. A different sense of “common ownership” instead came up in the Yasuni encuentro, where I have been hearing several indigenous voices speaking, all demanding an uncompromising end to oil exploration and an end to oil activities in the Yasuni. One after another these voices gave different illustrations of the reasons for this, but all repeated different versions of the same tune: Pachamama.
Pachamama is the deity of Andean origin and refers to “mother earth”,
not just as geological earth or nature but also as a set of relations, a
deity of reproduction, a protective rather than creative deity or
perhaps better, a deity for which human creation is just a moment in a
reproduction cycle. In this sense, the discourse is quite distinct from
Western environmentalism, that — apart from the Gaia hypothesis — sees
earth as simply the context of human activity. It seems to me that
paradoxically, the insistence on Pachamana, as the sacred mother earth
from which we depend on, is, quite amazingly, a materialist approach to
nature. The idea that “mother earth” is a precondition of our
existence echoes Marx’s notion that earth is the mother of value, that
is the precondition for all human activity, an insight often left out in
the compendia of Marxist thought.
The deity of Pachamama is a deity of protection, but as in all religions, is a reflection of a human cosmological vision that grounds action. It is men and women who must protect earth, if earth must deliver the means for human survival. Otherwise, “la Pachamama tiene hambre frecuente y si no se la nutre con las ofrendas o si casualmente se la ofende, ella provoca enfermedades” (wikipedia). The story of climate change seems to fit quite well with this narrative.
In the encuentro on the Yasuni, Pachamama is invoked endlessly in all different ways, until one realises there is little mysticism in Pachamama, or at least, the rational kernel of mysticism is grounded on solid material reality, the reality of property relations, of clashing idea of “common ownership”. The indignation of the people whose land is threatened with petrol leaks and toxic waste find in Pachamama a value discourse that clashes with the value discourse of the oil companies and the state, but at the same time enable them to compete with this discourse in terms of seeking alliances and building up the scale of the movement.
Standing on Pachamama allows this rebellious indigenous discourse to reveal three elements of conflict:
First, the question of use and access of land, of who has access and who can use it, the question of the community of commoners. This claim is made in terms of a basic bipolarism between who will promote life in the Yasuni, and who will promote death in the Yasuni: as emblazoned on the large banner at the encuentro, Yasuni is poised between life and death, and speech after speech remind us that the coalition of the Yasuni movement is a coalition that has embraced the project of life. The project of life find its political actors, its “commons entrepreneurs” in those who recognise a basic truth, and that is that the precondition for the reproduction of human life, of human creativity, of human existence, is our relation to Earth, because we and everything depend on Earth. As one man said “we cannot live without Pachamama, we have to eat, we have to dress ourselves, so we need Pachamama.” That is, we need not just “resources” as things to extract, but the processes that reproduce these resources, because we have also to eat and drink and dress tomorrow and for generations to come. From the recognition of the basic dependence, to the identification of the clash, there is a simple step: “those who do not believe in Pachamama, are sucking the blood of Pachamama”, that is oil and water, and thus also threatening the survival of the people. And since the river connects the various communities, and Pachamama is Pachamama for all, Pachamama also represents also the condition for the preservation of all communities. As put in another intervention:
“We are here for the life of Pachamama, for the life of all nationalities.”
This discourse is actually extended, since around the Yasumi there is a discursive recomposition that exceeds the struggle and the preservation of the indigenous communities, and begin to involve “planetary Pachamama”. Yasuni after all is a planetary lung of crucial importance for global climate and biodiversity, as is all the rest of the Amazon rain forest.
The claim over the Yasuni is thus in the first instance a claim over use and access: the people who recognise the importance of the Yasuni for their preservation must have use of and access to the forest.
The second element that emerges as a clash in ownership is the question of control. Who controls the destiny of the forest? Those who have secular knowledge on how to preserve it, to maintain its life while reproducing theirs, or the government? One man pointed this out:
“The government cannot negotiate on matters of the Amazon behind our back”
Another one said:
“The territories are autonomous and the companeros tiene da administrar el territorio [the comrades must administer the territory]”
Autonomous control of the territory by the indigenous community is crucial for the maintenance of appropriate use.
Finally there is the question of the overall value system that is able to articulate use/access and define the whats and hows of control, the value system that gives a particular form of property and ownership life and sustenance. This is a clash between Pachamama (and communal man) vs homo economicus (and earth as a mine). As a Quechi from Peru told us:
“Pachamama, this is what we drink, we eat, we dress...It is a lie that we need to work, to earn money, in order to raise children. It is by defending the land that we do this.”
The lie is of course a lie to the extent we see it from outside, from a different value system and value practices, in the case of the speaker, from the value system captured in Pachamama. In our daily life within capital’s loops, the lie of having to run the race to acquire money to get by is a very potent reality, one that blurs our vision and hides our ultimate dependence on the eco-system. Thus, this third conflictual element is the most difficult to deal with and recognise in a politically effective way, because in the course of the reproduction of daily life as “homo economicus”, our true “dependence on Pachamama” is structured in such a way that we see only our dependence on money and, therefore, on the social mechanisms that reproduce and accumulate money. How we disentangle ourselves from this is one of the most important questions we face. And obviously it is not only a question of “false consciousness”, because the dependence on money is real.
Thus, we have here a clash between two claims of ownership and the politics of “alliances” around these two claims. One, by the state and oil companies as “representative” of the ecuadorians, for which they administrate their oil resources while preserving the forest (sic — an impossibility). On the other by the Waorani as “representative” not only of ecuadorian, but of humanity as a whole, since the Waorani commoning on the Yasuni is the only way to sustain the Yasuni as planetary commons. To to put in another way we have the following points: 1) earth provides food, clothing and all we need — it cannot come from anywhere else! Hence to the community of the Yasuni, the preservation of the forest is of crucial importance. 2) therefore the indigenous claim common 'ownership' to the part of earth that give them sustenance, the yasuni - to the jungle, the river, the bio-physical relations therein. 3) a claim of common ownership that almost naturally turns into a claim of autonomy in terms of the administration of the territory, since the 'preservation' of the Waorani is one with the preservation of the Yasuni, and 4) Pachamama and homo economicus reveal two distinct and clashing valuing and measuring rationalities upon which notion of ownership (use access + control) are built. Yet, Pachamama is not lack of recognition of payoffs. The indigenous commons ownership also translates in payoffs to the Ecuadorian people (preservation of water sources for the entire country) and the world (through the preservation of the Amazon sink), thus the Yasuni is also a common to them, at a different scale, and with different modalities of use/access and control, yet a common nevertheless. Hence, the struggle here also provides a basic general framework within which to devise schemes of compensation and reparation through which not only the people of Yasuni stay without oil and trash, but also without poverty.