Pachamama versus the UN

It is easy to ridicule Evo Morales. While most politicians surround themselves with po-faced assistants and swivel eyed interns, the Morales delegation is a notoriously riotous and colourful affair. A street scene from La Paz painted on the dour belly of the UN.

At Cancun, Morales delivered a polemic as radical as the wardrobes, a polemic easily dismissed by the West and sometimes engendering anger from Western leaders. At COP15 last year then Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused Morales of holding the
conference ‘to ransom’.

The underlying schism between Morales and the West though is not simply between ‘reasonable’ and ‘radical’ political discourse, but rather that between coloniser and the colonised.

Ours is an era of profound change. The political and economic global order forged amidst the smoking ruins of two world wars is being challenged ever more convincingly by countries that were, in the first half of the twentieth century, merely the outposts of empires past. Nations, argued Edward Said, which were only figments of an Imperial imagination.

Morales stance at Cancun is perceived as unpalatable not simply in terms of policy, but also because it is rooted in a postcolonial mindset. This mindset, through its personifying of nature (Morales says nature should have rights) pays homage to God’s whom the Western world buried long ago, deep in its subconscious.

These god’s are coming back to haunt us though. Ecological science today is ever more defined by the Gaia hypothesis – named after the primordial Greek goddess of the earth (who manifests as Pachamama for many of the native peoples of South America). When first proposed this hypothesis aroused suspicion and amusement but, despite the ongoing protestations of Richard Dawkins and his macho populism, it is an ever more useful theoretical framework for understanding the earth and our place on it.

The Gaia hypothesis flies in the face of enlightenment philosophy, questioning the human/nature dichotomy that the enlightenment ingrained in the Western mindset and the privileged place that humankind has assigned itself on the planet. Morales question, therefore, of whether nature should have rights is probably the most fundamental question of our age.

For the Empire the question is sacrilege. The history of the twentieth century though is one of those progressives who dared to ask and, now it is time to ask again. When women asked for rights, they too were deemed too close to nature to be trusted at the Ballot box. Likewise the black, Asian and ‘other’ residents of the colonies, were once considered akin to nature – savages or primitives – unworthy of humane treatment.

Great progress has been made; today the rights of all are enshrined in law (though this law is not always practiced) and, as postcolonial theory has argued, the empire has ‘written back’. Today ‘world’ music, literature and culture (world generally meaning not emanating from the UK or the US) abounds and is greatly celebrated.

For the environment however the logic of Empire persists. This logic sees the earth and its non-human inhabitants as somehow ‘ours’; a resource, sustenance, food. All our efforts to mitigate cataclysmic climate change are infused with this logic and whatever measures we take they better not get in the way of our democratic right to consume, to eat burgers whenever we want and relentlessly travel the globe populating it with identikit high streets and good consumer ‘offers’.

This is where the UN process is going horribly wrong. It is trying to square the circle of limited resources with an economic and social model based fundamentally on perpetual consumption. International efforts to mitigate climate change are obviously commendable but the principle idea seems to be to put a price tag on resources which were once free; forests, carbon &c.

Merely integrating ecology and economy however fails to develop a blueprint for learning to live on our planet. The answer is economic sacrifice. Work less, consume less, have a lower GDP.

Such a proposal is outrageous to conventional logic, but why? I for one could happily work a little less, earn a little less, buy a little less and spend a little more time with my baby daughter. Relentless economic activity and the destruction it wreaks on the environment are the result of one thing only; greed.

The teleology that underpins the Western conception of history implies economic sacrifice is society in reverse – heading backwards. It is though the only answer. Morales rightly accused the world of an incredible lack of ambition. For the heartlands of the Empire this lack of ambition will have merely cosmetic effects but, for countries like Bolivia and so many others, it will be devastating.