Punctum Books

Chapter Title: Ecopolitics

Chapter Author(s): Eduardo Kohn

Book Title: Anthropocene Unseen

Book Subtitle: A Lexicon
Book Editor(s): Cymene Howe, Anand Pandian
Published by: Punctum Books. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hptbw.24

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 anthropocene unseen

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 21

Ecopolitics
Eduardo Kohn

I have written a book called How Forests Think (Kohn 2013),

which is drawn from my work in the Ecuadorian Amazon and
concerns a mode of thought that I call sylvan thinking: a kind
of thought, available to all of us, that extends well beyond the
human. It emerges with life and is particularly visible in dense
thickets of life like the tropical forest. I have argued that learning
again to think with and like forests should be part of an ethical
practice for the Anthropocene. On sabbatical in 2015-2o16, I re-
turned to Ecuador to try to understand how this particular kind
of ecologic might acquire a political life. That is, I wish to under-
stand how this form of thinking might guide us toward ways of
being that can nurture sylvan thought in all of its valences. To do
this I have been working with the Runa (or Kichwa) community
of Sarayaku, which has been at the forefront of indigenous alter-
politics (Hage 2012) for decades (see Becker 2012; Melo 2014).
In particular, I have collaborated with the community of
Sarayaku in the preparation of a proposal for the legal recog-
nition of a new category of protected territory that they call
Kawsak Sacha or the Living Forest, which they presented at the
COP21 Climate Summit in Paris in December 2015 and also, per-
sonally, to France’s then president, François Hollande. Kawsak
Sacha is a vision of ecological stewardship based on animist

doi: 10.21983/P3.0265.1.23 139

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 anthropocene unseen

principles (Descola 2013). I see it as a hopeful example of how

sylvan thinking goes political in these times of ecological crisis.
Here are two excerpts from the proposal:

Whereas the western world treats nature as an undemanding

source of raw materials destined exclusively for human use,
Kawsak Sacha recognizes that the forest is made up entirely
of living selves and the communicative relations they have
with each other. […] These selves, from the smallest plants
to the supreme beings who protect the forest, are persons
(runa).
Kawsak Sacha is where [we] interrelate with the supreme
beings of the forest in order to receive the guidance that leads
[us] along the path of Sumak Kawsay (Good Living). This
continuous relation that we […] have with the beings of the
forest is central, for on it depends the continuity of the Liv-
ing Forest, which, in turn permits a harmony of life among
many kinds of beings, as well as the possibility that we all can
continue to live into the future.

The people of Sarayaku control a territory of 135,000 hectares,

which they have designated as Kawsak Sacha. This territory is
demarcated by a border of flowering and fruiting trees, visible
from the air, which they call a Frontier of Life or Trail of Flow-
ers. In keeping with the idea that the forest is a communicative
ecology, the trail performs multiple communicative functions.
It tells outsiders of the existence of the Living Forest at the same
time that, in the words of the proposal, it “creates the possibil-
ity of beginning to dialogue with the beings that make up the
Living Forest. In this way the Frontier of Life creates a perma-
nent forum for communication among beings. This can help the
entire world recuperate the original understanding of Mother
Earth [Pachamama] as a shared home.”
One important goal of this proposal is to stop oil and min-
eral extraction on native lands and in tropical forests. Currently,
property titles in Ecuador apply only to the surface; the govern-

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 Ecopolitics

ment retains the right to exploit subsurface resources. By treat-

ing the Earth as a bundle of relations instead of a font of material
resources, Kawsak Sacha counters this statist extractive logic. Its
proponents frame Kawsak Sacha as “a robust proposal capable
of defending the Rights of Nature as it is enshrined in the Ecua-
dorian Constitution.” In fact, the proposal takes the logic of the
Rights of Nature one step further by emphasizing that “in order
to extend rights to Nature, one must first recognize its entities as
persons (and not mere objects).”
Here are three further excerpts:

We urge the world community to make an effort to achieve

a real metamorphosis (tiam). We need to shift from a mod-
ernizing model of development — a model that treats nature
as material resource — to the alternative of Kawsak Sacha,
which recognizes that forming community with the many
kinds of selves with whom we share our world is a better way
to orient our economic and political activities.
[As guardians of the forest it is our responsibility to make
manifest] that the very governments that put forth solemn
discourses criticizing imperialism, capitalism, and colonial-
ism are promoting, in the supposed name of democracy,
large-scale neocolonialist extractive projects on our lands.
[…] [The] gradual disappearance of this ensemble of life that
Kawsak Sacha seeks to sustain is nothing more and nothing
less than ecocide — that is, it is the systematic extermination
of an ensemble of living interrelated selves. And this crime
against Humanity and Nature, has, until now, gone unpun-
ished. With the hope of putting a brake on this violence, our
proposal is an urgent call to the world community […].
To conclude […]: the entire world is peopled by beings
that sustain our planet thanks to their way of living in con-
tinuous interrelation and dialogue. This vision is neither a
quaint belief nor a simple conservationist ideal. It is instead
a call to the people of the world to learn once again to feel
this reality in their very being. This […] will only be pos-
sible once we learn to listen to and dialogue with these other

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 anthropocene unseen

beings that are part of a cosmic conversation that goes well

beyond […] us humans. [This] would be the basis for con-
ceptualizing, building, and disseminating a genuine Sumak
Kawsay in our world — a world that today is threatened by
an ecological crisis of planetary proportions.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to several Sarayaku community members for lively

philosophical conversations and hospitality: José Gualinga,
Felix Santi, Hernán Malaver, Franco Viteri, Yaku Viteri, Tupac
Viteri, Dionicio Machoa, Sabine Bouchat, Renán Gualinga, and
Patricia Gualinga. Thanks to Chris Hebdon for logistical help
and for many stimulating discussions around the Living Forest.

References

Becker, Marc. 2012. Pachakutik: Indigenous Movements and

Electoral Politics in Ecuador. Updated edition. Lanham:
Rowman and Littefield.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated
by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Originally published in 2005.
Hage, Ghassan. 2012. “Critical Anthropological Thought
and the Radical Political Imaginary Today.” Critique
of Anthropology 32, no. 3: 285–308. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0308275X12449105.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an
Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Melo, Mario. 2014. “Voces de la selva en el estrado de la Corte
Interamericana de Derechos Humanos.” SUR: Revista
Internacional de Derechos Humanos 11, no. 20: 291–99.

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