Rebecca Borges (Universitat Pompeu Fabra/POLLEN Secretariat)
Humpback whales swimming and jumping out of the water in the blue ocean. Turtle hatchlings racing towards the waves in a fight for survival against all odds. These are the images that I grew up with on TV back in the 90s and inspired me to become an ecologist. Back then, TV documentaries – at least the ones I remember – stressed how beautiful nature was (and still is!) and how much it needed protection (and it still does!). Important to say, though, is that this protection was needed from us – humans, broadly speaking. The best way to protect nature? To keep it at a safe distance from people. Keep it reserved and let no one near it. No one, except maybe ecologists and other scientists, of course. All the more reason for me to want to become one! After all, I wanted to have this privilege of being close to nature, and the only acceptable excuse would be to study it for the sake of nature’s protection, or so I believed.
Fast forward many years into my training as a biologist. I’m really into conservation prioritization. At the time, I was fascinated by the simple yet powerful algorithms and by the idea that a good plan and a beautiful map could give us those safe havens – protected areas – where nature would be allowed to thrive without our interference. Some sound, scientific spatial data here, some strategic and smart goals there, and – voilà! The perfect plan is baked: scientific, technical, and even mathematical! Surely nothing could be wrong – or go wrong – with a plan designed like this. Our seas and lands – our Oikos – just needed more of these amazing plans!
While studying a local marine planning process, I noticed a considerable difference between the algorithm-generated zoning plan and the final approved plan that came into effect. “What happened?”, I asked a local expert. “The zoning created by the program went through several rounds of public consultations.” I was slightly frustrated but also curious. Aren’t the algorithm and all those high-quality data and carefully designed targets enough? Isn’t the Ecology of it all enough? Why all that politics? Can’t the whole thing just be technical and evidence-based?1
The scientist in me wanted to investigate this further. During my PhD, I worked with traditional communities and was drawn closer to the Polis – the politics of it all. I understood that there is no Oikos without the Polis, without the human communities that make up this home that we call “nature”. There is no nature, broadly speaking, without humans and their politics. At least, not for the last hundreds of millennia. Ever since the connections between the social and the ecological, the Oikos and the Polis, became clear to me, I have been looking at the Polis for solutions. I came across a body of knowledge that inspires and gives me, as well as others, hope. I encountered a confluence of struggles that show the unity of human and non-human beings, an intersection of oppressed humans and fellow beings on this Earth.
In only ten years of looking closely at the Polis I became certain that there seems to be very meager achieving high-level biodiversity targets and little hope to bring about widespread environmental justice. International bodies seem to have become talk shops, and international law, treaties, and conventions for all of nature, including human beings, are no more than, as Greta Thunberg put it, “blah blah blah”. These three silly words represent surprisingly and shamefully well what global high-level politics has become. Beautiful words, written and spoken, but little action to save our Oikos and the Polis that inhabit it.
Amid the failings, what is left for me as a political ecologist to do? Keep writing scientific papers that are neither beautiful words nor plans for concrete and meaningful action? What is left for academic political ecology to do? To find a way forward for Political Ecology, for the Oikos and the Polis, I have to look outside academia. Inside academia, I largely found beautiful words, at best. At worst, I discovered active support for the colonial enterprise, including among people who advocate for those smart, technical spatial plans.
I need to look beyond academia. I look at people like Chico Mendes, to whom a famous quote is attributed: “Ecology without politics is gardening.” With all due respect to the job and the hobby of gardening, it is clear to me that to save our Oikos and our Polis (or myriad thereof), gardening, albeit needed, is not enough. As an academic political ecologist, I am convinced that we need to go beyond gardening, beyond pruning and watering. The path ahead is unclear, but I hope to keep looking for a way to be a political ecologist who builds this path in the only way possible: collectively.
As part of the POLLEN secretariat, this is what I hope all of us can contribute to. I firmly believe that the path to a future where the Polis is still part of the Oikos is a path of collective action, built by and for networks and coalitions of political ecologists willing to name and tackle the root problems (colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, zionism, speciesism, among others). This is the only way that political ecology can sail and march towards a just and diverse future for our Oikos and our Polis.
Besides being part of the POLLEN secretariat, I am currently an investigator with the DIVERSE2 project, while writing papers and a research proposal on the topic of coastal-marine boundaries and social-ecological systems.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
1 I need to stress that the view I am exposing here does not reflect the understanding or attitude of the “conservation prioritization community” towards the emergence of planning algorithms such as Marxan or Zonation nor is it aligned with best practices in the field. In fact, I still believe that these tools and related frameworks/initiatives such as marine spatial planning can be powerful instruments in the toolbox of conservation theory and practice.
2 https://www.upf.edu/web/diverse