How Nature’s rights are violated

This compilation of three pieces by the same author is a passionate defense of the rights of Nature, currently violated by the extractionist economy and “extrahección” projects in Latin America imposed by Northern corporations with the complicity of conservative governments and even ones claiming to be socialist or leftist, as is happening here in Nicaragua.

Eduardo Gudynas

What does the word forest conjure up for us? Some will say it’s a large group of trees. Others will add that it’s also the ferns, orchids, shrubs and many other plant species. Some will insist that the fauna—whether as small as beetles or toads or as large as tapirs or jaguars—are also part of this habitat, and that without them we aren’t dealing with a real forest.

A forest can be understood and even felt by starting from the life it shelters. The forest is this combination of elements, but it’s also a lot more than a simple aggregate of them. There will even be some who claim that a forest can express moods, be angry or acquiescent. From this perspective the forest has its own attributes, aside from any usefulness it could have for us humans or any opinion we may have about it. It is in this very sensibility that Nature’s rights are rooted.

In accepting such rights, one immediately acknowledges that the forest, or any other environment, has its own intrinsic values independent from those of humans. This breaks with the classical position, which claims that value can only be given by people, thus constraining Nature to be an object of rights, not a subject of them.

Natural resources are now sustaining
Latin America’s economic growth

The perspective that recognizes the environment with its own values is very close to what could be called common sense. But this perception has been manipulated and transformed for a long time. The forest has been distanced from our immediate proximity, placed beyond the world of humans. Then it was separated into different components that could be manipulated. And more recently it has been commercialized. Under conventional development, the interrelated orchestra of life that is a forest was replaced by a disjointed assemblage of natural resources or made into the supplier of ecosystemic goods and services.

The high rate of natural resource appropriation currently supporting Latin American economic growth is only possible following this disarticulation, this dismemberment. In order to be able to tolerate these amputations, Nature needs to be distanced, seen just as an assemblage of resources to be exploited. This is today’s prevailing view, in which forests no longer have inherent value, only the value humans assign them. This is what happens, for example, when the idea of a tree is replaced by the idea of “five cubic feet of lumber worth a hundred dollars.”

Nature-as-object is in keeping with human petulance, the arrogant view that views trees are only important if they’re useful, i.e. when they provide raw materials or when they can be protected by profitable market mechanisms. On the other hand, if their intrinsic value were accepted, humans would be just one more element in the environment and would have to relinquish their privileged position.

Two ethical views
on the values of Nature

Considering that ethics is the terrain on which different forms of valuation are discussed, we are clearly now facing two very different ethical postures. One insists that only human beings can endow values and, therefore, the non-human will always be—and can only ever be—the subject of valuation. The other position recognizes intrinsic values, which exist independently and apart from people. The first position must be understood as a form of anthropocentricism, because it considers human beings as the source of all validation. The second is a form of biocentrism, as it focuses on all forms of life. These two perspectives have been in tension many times, at least over the last 150 years. On more than one occasion positions defending intrinsic values have managed to emerge, but so far they’ve failed to impose themselves.

The first cases were found in the late 19th and early 20th century. Outstanding among them was the US philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who, besides promoting civil disobedience, engaged in a two-year experiment in “simple living” on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, that resulted in some exquisite reflections on his intense rapport with Nature. Somewhat later, the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) launched a campaign in 1897 promoting the idea of protecting natural areas for their beauty and other values and within three years got the US Congress to pass a National Park bill, establishing both the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. His position was opposed by the utilitarian conservationism championed by Republican politician Gifford Pinchot. It should be clarified that the utilitarian position can also be interested in conserving the environment. While sometimes this can be for moral reasons, for example compassion for whales or panda bears, it’s really focused on Nature’s real or potential utility and the protection measures are always geared to economic functionality. There’s no place in this position for Nature’s rights, as the prevalent criteria are efficiency, technical management and exploitation.

The other perspective is based on Nature’s own values and aims to protect the life that surrounds us, not for utilitarian reasons but in defense of life itself. In the late 19th century, such sensibility was criticized as romantic or transcendentalist.

Independent of these debates, which spread from the United States to other Northern countries, there were also some early examples in South America. An early utilitarian conservationism grew out of the alarm at the huge amount of waste from forestry extraction in 19th-century Brazil. We also found the other position, the best example of which is the Bolivian writer Manuel Céspedes Anzoleaga (1874-1932), known by his pseudonym Man Césped. This pioneer believed that the land shouldn’t have owners and defended life beyond any utilitarianism. When he wrote, for example, that “every plant is a simple and beautiful life, whose rusticity shouldn’t motivate indifference or mistreatment,” he was unquestionably recognizing intrinsic values.

The long journey of the rights of Nature

The first biocentric positions gradually faded out, but thanks to US environmentalist and author Aldo Leopold (1997-1948), they returned to the foreground in the 1940s. Although he was best known as a forestry engineer and one of the founders of “wildlife management,” an almost technological approach to managing fauna, circumstances changed Leopold substantially. One such circumstance was a trip he made to Mexico between 1936 and 1937, where he saw how peasants and indigenous people interacted with the forests and recognized the negative impact of agricultural intensification. He ended up breaking with the arrogance of technological management and instead became a promoter of what he called the land ethic, which he explained in his book A Sand County Almanac: “the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.”

Leopold argued for minimal intervention in the environment, wanting humans to adapt to ecosystems with Nature determining the criteria of what is right or wrong, in which all that served to protect it was good. According to Leopold, this ethic is only feasible through love, respect and admiration for Nature.

Despite his drive, Loeopold’s ideas almost fell into oblivion, but the biocentric perspective reemerged again in the 1980s from several sources. On the one hand, his ideas were articulated into what the inspirational Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) called “deep ecology,” a position that recognizes intrinsic values and puts them onto a wider ethical platform. Naess was the principal exponent of this movement.

At the same time, a new group emerged amongst practicing conservationists that demanded more vigorous militant action based on both science and biocentric ethics. Much the same as Naess’ deep ecology, this position, known as “conservation biology,” argued that Nature possesses values in itself. Not only that, it put something very obvious on the table: the recognition of inherent values wasn’t a Western invention; it was shared by many indigenous peoples. Under different names and expressed in various ways, these were all biocentric positions. With that, many examples were recovered and new alliances were interwoven among environmentalists, conservationists and indigenous organizations.

Despite this new drive, however, the biocentric view was relegated to the back burner yet again, pushed there by the avalanche of increasingly commercialized environmental management. Precisely in those years new economic instruments began to be developed, such as payment for environmental goods and services, which are only possible under a utilitarian ethic.

These rights are
always rooted in a territory

The latest reappearance of the biocentric ethic is explained by the recent political renewal in the Andean countries and growing concern about both local and global environmental issues. The most striking example is the incorporation of the Rights of Nature into Ecuador’s new 2008 Constitution.

The Ecuadorian legal system has significant autonomy, with the social movements making substantial contributions to it, and this possibly explains some of its special features. The wording of the Constitution is very clear, both in recognizing Nature as a subject and redefining it in broader and more intercultural terms and in incorporating the Pachamama (Mother Earth) concept. It is another novel step in indicating that the restoration of degraded environments is also one of Nature’s rights.

This new formulation allows us to identify another key aspect. The rights of Nature are always those of a particular Nature, one rooted in a specific territory. They belong to specific environments, such as a river basin, the Andean plateau or the southern grasslands. This feature must be always kept in mind in order to know how to differentiate it from other proposals it may resemble but that are in reality very different, such as the pleas about the rights of Mother Nature made by the Bolivian government’s spokespeople.

Undoubtedly this appeal could attract adherents, as it’s associated with an understandable and necessary critique of capitalism. But a close examination shows that, in reality, the Bolivian posture focuses on a few planetary rights. This is substantially different because Nature’s rights aren’t the same as the Earth’s or the biosphere’s rights. Nor are the political implications the same, as global ecological functionality can be safeguarded at the same time as our local environments are being destroyed.

The new advances in the rights of Nature are once again being threatened by the conventional, utilitarian view. The insistence on a “green economy” so as to relaunch globalization is a clear example. The response to this situation continues to be to learn to look at the forest as an equal, where the life it houses has inherent value and our commitment should be to ensure its survival.

Would Marx be an extractionist
in today’s Latin America?

In Latin America, the government strategies focusing on mining, hydrocarbons and mono-crop agriculture continue to go forward even though they involve going back to supplying raw materials and repressing citizens’ resistance to this model. Both conservative and progressive governments are extractionist today but persistence in this model has become an enormously complicated political knot for the latter because another kind of development is expected of progressive governments.

New political justifications are being used to maintain the extractionist drive. One of the most striking is the invoking of old socialist thinkers to argue that not only would they not oppose 21st-century extractivism but would promote it. Surely the most outstanding example was when Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, in a May 2012 interview prior to his reelection, tossed out two challenging questions in order to defend extractivism: “Where does it say no to mining in the Communist Manifesto? Which socialist theory says no to mining?”

President Correa then upped the ante by, in addition to quoting Marx and Engels, putting in a noteworthy addendum of his own: “Socialist countries were traditionally mining countries.” The message is that the theoretical basis of socialism works for extractivism and that, in practice, real socialist countries implemented it successfully. If he were right, Marx and Engels would be encouraging mining, oil exploitation and mono-cropping for export in today’s Latin America.

The extremely high cost of
real socialism’s extractivism

Let’s start by evaluating the validity of Correa’s challenge. In the first place, you can’t expect the Communist Manifesto, written in the mid-19th century, to contain all the answers to 21st-century problems.

Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, two of the 20th-century’s most renowned Marxists, pointed out that later in their lives both Marx and Engels considered the wording of the Communist Manifesto outdated, although the principles were still correct. They specifically and implicitly acknowledged that as capitalism spread and brought new countries and regions into the mainstream of modern history, developmental issues and forms would necessarily emerge that weren’t contemplated by the Manifesto. This is unquestionably the case with the Latin American countries, where contextualizing both the questions and the answers is of paramount importance.

It also isn’t entirely true that all socialist countries really were mining countries. And in those where mining escalated in importance, we now know that the environmental, social and economic bottom line was very negative. One of the most powerful examples is Poland’s mining and steel-making areas under the Soviet shadow. The living situation in China’s mining areas today is equally terrible.

And let’s not forget that, given their high social and environmental cost, many of these ventures only become viable when the environmental controls are inadequate or the authorities silence citizens’ demands. It also can’t be ignored that Soviet-style extractivism was unable to generate the economic and productive leap forward predicted in the plans.

Rafael Correa dreams of
an extractionist Marx

Extractivism is being currently defended from progressive positions because they aspire to maximize their economic interests in order to finance various social plans on the one hand and change their productive basis or even create another economy on the other.

The problem is that this makes the social plans dependent on extractivism. For example, the possibility of providing monthly income to subsidize the poorest sectors would be reduced without the taxes on the export of raw materials. This makes the State itself extractionist, an associate of very diverse projects, in which it must court investors of all kinds and provide them various facilities.

This model unquestionably involves progressive changes. The problem is that the social and environmental impacts are repeated and the national economy’s role as a subordinate raw materials supplier is reinforced.

The claim that more extractivism is the way out of this dependence has no chance of becoming true. Extractivism creates a situation in which its various consequences, from economic to political, such as the displacement of local industry, overvaluation of national currency or the tendency to combat citizen resistance with repression, ensure the impossibility of the promised transition taking place. Using extractivism as a tool for economic redistribution has limited scope, as demonstrated by the repeated social mobilizations against these investments. Another cost is that it makes governments even more desperate for new extractionist projects.

All these deviant relationships should be carefully analyzed when looking at Marx. Correa’s message shows that, aside from the quotations, he really doesn’t take Marx’s principles, which are still relevant for the 21st century, into account.

Extractivism isn’t mining
and socialism isn’t distribution

To be sure, Marx didn’t reject mining, but most social movements don’t either. If you listen carefully to their demands you’ll find that they focus on rejecting a particular type of venture: large-scale, intensive surface mining that results in the removal of vast amounts of material. In other words, mining mustn’t be confused with extractivism.

While Marx didn’t reject mining, he was very clear about where the changes should come into play and that perspective provides answers to Correa’s challenges. Marx distinguished between primitive and substantive socialism and it’s that differentiation that should be very carefully considered today.

In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx recalls that the distribution of the means of consumption is really a consequence of the modes of production. Intervening in consumption doesn’t involve transforming the modes of production, but this final level is where real transformations must take place. And Marx added: “Primitive socialism has learned from bourgeois economists to consider and deal with distribution as something independent from the mode of production, and therefore, exposes socialism as a doctrine that primarily revolves around distribution.”

So here’s the answer to Correa: Marx wouldn’t be extractionist in today’s Latin America because being so would mean abandoning his goal of transforming the modes of production and simply becoming a bourgeois economist. On the contrary, he would be promoting production alternatives. And in our current context this means moving towards post-extractivism.

Marx’s perspective certainly isn’t enough to organize a way out of extractivism. He was a man immersed in the ideas of progress characteristic of modernity but his thinking allows us to identify the direction the alternatives must take. Clearly, instrumental adjustments or redistributive improvements can represent progress, but it’s still imperative to transcend dependence on extractivism as a key element of the current modes of production. This issue is so clear that even Marx concluded: “Once the true relationship of things is clarified, as it has been for a long time now, why go back again?” Why, then, continue to insist on extractivism?

Extrahección

Extrahección is a new term to describe the appropriation of natural resources by imposing power and violating humans’ rights and those of Nature. While the word is new, the concept is well known. It describes situations that are gradually becoming more common, such as mining or oil ventures imposed through violence, ignoring citizens’ voices, uprooting peasant or indigenous communities and polluting the environment.

The word comes from the Latin verb extrahere, which means to rip something out, dragging it toward one. It is therefore an appropriate term to describe situations where natural resources are wrested away from either local communities or from Nature. In these circumstances different rights are violated and it’s precisely this aspect that this new term reflects.

It covers a wide range of violated rights, including environmental impacts, such as the destruction of natural ecosystems through the pollution of water, soil and air; loss of access to water… All are violations of what are called third-generation rights, those focusing on the quality of life and the right to a healthy environment. Some extractive ventures in countries like Ecuador, where the rights of Nature are recognized, are clearly incompatible with that ecological constitutional mandate.

In addition to such environmental impacts, peoples’ rights are affected in a variety of ways. Prior, free and informed consultations with the local communities are repeatedly infringed or their results forced, as has been reported in various projects in the Andean countries. Violations are also committed when communities are forced to displace, as continues to happen with mining operations in the Carajás region of Brazil.

In places where ventures are in operation, we hear complaints of the violation of workers’ rights either to unionization or to their health and safety conditions, as coal workers in Colombia have reported. Nor can corrupt practices such as bribery be overlooked, whether in order to accept social or environmental high-impact practices or to obtain a project’s operation permit.

Mining projects lead to
criminalized protests

Extrahección also describes the circumstances of undertakings imposed by silencing citizens’ voices in different ways. It’s becoming common practice to “judicialize” protests by suing the leaders, who end up immersed in legal processes for years, their assets seized, their travel restricted… Another step is to criminalize citizen action, putting it under an umbrella charge of vandalism, sabotage or terrorism. The Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America (OCMAL) recently compiled cases of such criminali¬zation in several Latin American countries.

Finally, extrahección covers various forms of direct violence exercised by individuals or groups, whether paramilitary forces or the State’s own police, military or security forces. A recent international review found that the three largest mining corporations (Río Tinto, Vale and BHP Billiton) have been involved in violent episodes, several in Latin American countries.

There has been violent repression of demonstrations, kidnapping and even murders. There are many recent examples: repression of civil demonstrations in different locations in Argentina and of the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) march in Bolivia as well as at least 5 dead and more than 40 wounded in a Conga mining conflict in Peru. These and other cases are illegal acts taking place in countries where human rights are legally protected.

Neither can “semi-legal” situations go unnoticed where the legal formalities are maintained but result in clearly illegal acts. Examples are corporations that take advantage of regulatory loopholes to release pollutants into the environment or wash their hands of the companies they subcontract to implement actions having major negative impact on local communities.

When the State doesn’t ensure its own regulatory framework on rights, local communities have had to appeal to international agencies such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, making visible many cases that were previously buried by governmental indifference, such as happened in Guatemala, with the petition that the Marlin mine be closed to ensure the health of local communities.

The violation of rights
is a condition of these projects

Do we need this new word extrahección to describe these violations of the rights of humans and of Nature? We do, because they aren’t just unexpected consequences or the results of isolated acts by misguided individuals, as governmental or corporate sectors frequently argue to dissociate their activities from such violations. Such justifications are unacceptable because the violation of rights has become an inseparable and inevitable component of a certain kind of natural resource extraction.

The flagrant violation of rights occurs when the extractive activities encompass enormous areas, when they undertake intensive procedures—using pollutants, for example—or when the risks at stake are very high and, therefore, would never be acceptable under the legal frameworks or for the local communities. The only way they can go ahead is thus through imposition and the violation of fundamental rights.

In these cases, the violation of rights is not a consequence but a necessary condition in order to carry out this kind of natural resource appropriation. They are facets of the same type of intimately interlinked development. It’s this particular dynamic that explains the concept of extrahección.

It’s no longer enough to say that the violation of certain rights is one of the consequences of more intensive extractivism. The intimate relationship between extractivvism and the violation of rights must be made clear, in which extractive strategies for appropriating natural resources are only possible by infringing the rights of individuals and of Nature.

Eduardo Gudynas is a researcher for the Uruguay-based Latin American Center for Social Ecology (CLAES). These writings were distributed by the Latin America Information Agency (ALAI) and edited by envío.

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