Description

"Equitable Relations: Re-imagining Sustainability From a Non-anthropocentric Perspective"

Veronica Strang started her career as a freelance writer exploring environmental issues, which took me from the UK to the Caribbean and then to Canada. Projects with the Ministry of the Environment in Ontario led to involvement in the production of the 1987 Brundtland Report Our Common Future. This raised key questions for her about why some societies are better at living with the non-human world than others. Seeking answers to these questions, she signed up for a Master’s course in Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. This provided such an illuminating way of thinking that she continued down the road to a Ph.D. and life as an academic. For the last 30 years, her research and consultancy work has been concerned with human-environmental relationships, in particular societies’ engagements with water. Every society has pressing water issues, so this has taken her all over the world, but her major ethnographic research has been in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Dr. Strang has worked with the water industry and multiple water-using groups including indigenous people, farmers, miners, urban and recreational water users, conservation organizations, museums, and artists. Her research also involves collaboration with diverse organizations ranging from local communities to the water sector, and to international bodies such as UNESCO, the UN, the World Bank, and the International Water Association. She writes for both academic and general audiences, as well as giving public lectures and interviews in a range of media.

Abstract: This paper explores ways to rethink concepts of sustainability from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Inspired by indigenous worldviews envisioning indivisible worlds and commensurately circular economies, it critiques dualistic models of culture and nature. It argues that notions of human exceptionalism, and the positioning of nature as ‘other’, are foundational to exploitative practices in which the costs of human activities are externalized to an objectified and commodified non-human domain. Based on dualistic assumptions, and aimed at continuous growth, conventional and often hegemonic ideas about ‘sustainable development’ have not achieved – and intrinsically cannot achieve – sufficient protection for non-human species and ecosystems. This paper, therefore, re-imagines concepts of sustainability from a more egalitarian perspective, in which humankind is conceptually relocated within an undivided world of living kinds. Recognizing non-human beings and material environments as the dynamic co-creators of a shared world, rather than as the passive subjects of human action, moves our thinking towards ideas about human-non-human partnership and reciprocity, in which upholding the needs and interests of all living kinds is more obviously imperative. Engaging with indigenous activism and emergent ideas about non-human rights and interspecies democracy, and drawing on ideas about ‘re-imagined communities’, the paper, therefore, considers how non-human needs and interests can be better represented in societies’ decision-making processes. This needs to happen at every scale, but applying these ideas is highly feasible at a local level. The paper, therefore, concludes with some ideas about how more robust concepts of sustainability might be applied in river catchment areas.