Anthropocene Discourse in Latin America: Astrid Ulloa on the Displacement of Politics and Human/Non-Human Inequalities

 

Astrid Ulloa gave a talk in March 2020 entitled, “Anthropocene and Capitalocene in Latin America: Rethinking anthropocentrism or displacing politics and inequalities between humans and non-humans.” The lecture was given as part of the international conference, “Living on the Edge: Studying Conviviality - Inequality in Uncertain Times” in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was posted on YouTube by the channel Mecila Merian Center on May 12, 2020. The talk focused mainly on the growth of anthropocene studies over the last few years and its slow adoption by academics in Latin America. She states that in the last five years the conversation surrounding the Anthropocene has changed completely in that participants have belatedly begun to make more room for countries in the global south and people of color. Ulloa comments that when she began to attend conferences on the Anthropocene five years ago, there were only two participants from Latin America and only two conferences which discussed indigenous communities. 

Astrid Ulloa has a PhD in Geography and is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Much of her work centers on the intersections of anthropology, climate change, and Anthropocene studies. She has previously written on community based management of agriculture, and the cultural and environmental politics of indigenous people in Latin America and Colombia. Her research interests include indigenous movements, indigenous autonomy, gender, climate change, territoriality, and extractivism. Ulloa’s last book, Sustainability from the Bottom Up: the fight over gender and ethnicity, centers on the experience and knowledge of indigenous women in Colombia and the fight for what she calls “nutritional sovereignty.” 

Ulloa argues that the concept of the Anthropocene is a relatively new concept in Latin America. Five years ago, of the 4,000 sources from around the world on the topic of the Anthropocene, only three were from Latin America. The aim of her presentation is to explore what the discourse surrounding Anthropocene and Capitalocene studies could mean for Latin America. “‘Anthropocene’, is a term that appeared in the year 2000 that proposed a new geological epoch. This generated a series of discussions concerning global climate change and the school of related topics including anthropocene and capitalocene studies.” She finds that many of the debates spawned by the notion of the Anthropocene were too focused on finding a date or inciting event to mark the beginning of the new epoch. Ulloa argues that whether the Anthropocene began when the first humans appeared on earth, or began with the Industrial Revolution, it oversimplifies the problem. The idea of the Aanthropocene produces an image of a global community that ignores or writes over the issues of gender, ethnicity, and local territoriality. 

As discourse about the Anthropocene shifted, the discussion expanded to include indigenous experience and knowledge as well as the global south and the way they are disproportionately affected by climate change. In her 2017 study, “Saving and Defending Natural Territories: Indigenous women and nutritional sovereignty in Colombia,” Ulloa lays out her research on indigenous groups in the Anthropocene. "Environmental transformations, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and the process of extraction have affected indigenous territories, and their practices and ways of life which involve non-human elements. These situations have generated new territorial, social-cultural, and environmental dynamics." Ulloa’s notion of human and non-human relationships in the Anthropocene opens new avenues for discourse. 

Indigenous cultural, territorial, and environmental politics consider land and territory to have its own autonomy and politics. In the processes of globalization and mercantilism of territories as well as nature, indigieous communities recognize territories as living beings.

(GG)

Image source: https://www.inhabitat.com/rio20-climate-change-damage-could-cost-latin-america-100-billion-per-year/

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