An Ethnography of Global Environmentalism

Becoming Friends of the Earth

Caroline Gatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415717625
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317975045
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of "a better future for the globe." In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI's ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.

1 Introduction

Environmentalism, Globality and Anthropology in our Common World

In 1969 David Brower, then a member of the Sierra Club, a leading US environmentalist organisation, despaired of the organisation’s conservationist approach and refusal to address questions of justice. He left his position in the organisation and set up Friends of the Earth (FoE) in the United States. Two years later, in 1971, together with activists from England, France and Sweden, Brower created an international federation that they called Friends of the Earth International (FoEI). Today, more than forty years later, the official website describes FoEI as ‘the world’s largest grassroots environmental network, uniting 75 national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on every continent. With over 2 million members and supporters around the world’.¹ FoEI differs from many other environmentalist federations because, rather than being solely concerned with nature conservation, the federation is equally concerned with social justice. A number of academics (Doherty 2006; Timmer 2007), as well as many FoEI activists, compare FoEI to Greenpeace. In this comparison, the two organisations differ primarily due to FoEI’s emphasis on a decentralised organisational structure. Indeed, FoEI expresses this focus on decentralisation by referring to itself as a ‘grassroots’ federation or network. Although the actual discourse and practice of decentralisation in FoEI is explored throughout this book, the aim of decentralisation in FoEI has resulted in significant diversity across the member groups and in the types of environmentalism they bring to the federation. FoEI membership is restricted to one FoE group per country.² Membership requirements include independence from religious or ethnic movements, political parties and economic interest groups, and a democratic, non-sexist structure. Member groups range from the primarily nature conservation groups—such as Global 2000 (FoE Austria)—to environmental and human rights advocacy groups—such as Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center, Kasama sa Kalikasan (FoE Philippines). Importantly, each group has its own mission statement, if it has a mission statement at all. The value given to being a ‘grassroots’ federation is expressed in the importance assigned to these differences. Moreover, many activists maintain and strive for decentralised decision-making as an important quality of their own environmentalism. As a result, FoEI is recognised as one of the main networks of climate justice (Bond 2015).

Above I have offered a description of Friends of the Earth International that resembles the ways FoEI is communicated to broad audiences. Since the rest of the book will destabilise most of the aspects, it is necessary first to offer this picture of FoEI as a point of comparison. This is, after all, the same process I had to undergo in the research; I was offered an official description of FoEI and along the way different aspects became apparent. Friends of the Earth International is, in Eriksen’s (2007: 77) terms, a ‘truly transnational’ organisation; it is an environmentalist federation that includes human rights in ‘the environment’. However, the central notions employed both by Eriksen and in FoEI’s mission statement—global, transnational, environmentalist and organisation—rather than simply being adjectives, are invitations for ethnographic exploration and analysis. This book is a response to these invitations. It is also a hopeful response. Through this book I hope to join in the efforts being made worldwide by people, some of whom are Friends of the Earth activists, to work towards a more sustainable, and equitable, shared world. The particular approach of anthropology is to join in that endeavour with critical ethnographic attention to the constitutive forces at play in the contexts we work in, but also to offer speculative imaginings that, whether deliberately or not, have political and constitutive effects of their own.

For a long time anthropologists argued that the method of long-term fieldwork in locations distant from places they were familiar with was essential in developing that particular attention considered ‘ethnographic’. One key element in this ethnographic attentiveness, but by no means the only one, is the ability to become aware of one’s assumptions about the world and how life is, how it has come to be that way, and how it should be lived. Carrying out fieldwork in distant, unfamiliar places was one way to bring such assumptions into awareness. Confronted with radically different ways of life, those anthropologists educated in formal Western educational systems found all sorts of taken-for-granted things like religion, economics, family, history, politics and, of course, nature, if recognised at all, to be construed quite differently. Broadly speaking, this highlights anthropology’s commitment to developing theory, drawn from empirical findings, that at least does not contradict the experience of informants (Coleman and Collins 2006; Amit 2000). This is an amended position from Malinowski’s programmatic statement of trying to understand ‘the native’s point of view’ (1922: 25), or in Geertz’s formulation ‘the actor’s point of view’ (1973). With this fundamentally important qualification, fieldwork can be thought of as a method of defamiliarisation through which, by trying to understand a way of life different to one’s own, one could not only come to appreciate the great diversity of human life but also to question one’s own way of life, and to practice a form of cultural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1999).

It took quite a tempestuous debate in anthropology, still far from resolved, to acknowledge that even with very rigorous preparation, anthropologists could still reproduce their own assumptions even when confronted with ways of life apparently radically different from their own. Anthropological accounts risked ‘explaining away’ (Strathern 1990) the ‘explanations’ of the world of the people with whom anthropologists worked, the very people whose ‘point of view’ they were trying to understand. In this way, they could end up not really questioning their own assumptions at all. This realisation leads Viveiros de Castro (1998) to argue for the need to ‘take seriously’ accounts encountered in fieldwork, and to recognise the effects of epistemological colonialism (Viveiros de Castro et al. 2014). Bearing in mind Viveiros de Castro’s specific proposals and what he means by taking things seriously, the experiences, struggles and hopes through which FoEI activists live raise important questions about politics, ethics and ontology. The questions the work and lives of FoEI activists raise relate to the ways anthropologists and FoEI activists imagine belonging: their own belonging and the world they belong to as well as the world they work towards.

Globality and Ontological Politics

Since the 1980s, more and more anthropologists have been doing fieldwork ‘at home’, challenging the received distinction between sociology as the study of the complex and anthropology as the study of the distant and small-scale societies of other people. Doing fieldwork ‘at home’ once again raises the methodological question of familiarity. Would the ethnographer be able to develop the distance required for a critical analysis if they were ‘too close’ to the context of study? One thing to note was that in the 1980s a lot of what was called anthropology at home was not actually in places or contexts that the anthropologists carrying out the studies were familiar with at all. Although the anthropologist may not have left their native nation-states to do their fieldwork, it was nevertheless carried out in remote communities or among groups from very different socio-economic backgrounds (Strathern 1987). Only few works actually include university life (Bourdieu 1984; Peacock 2013) or the anthropologist’s own childhood (ex Okely1992) as part of the explicit context of study. Often reflexivity was considered to be ‘navel gazing’, and autoethnography was barely mentioned in major anthropology journals—although nowadays gaining more attention, this is mostly in other disciplines such as education and art.

My first job after graduating from university with a BA degree in Anthropology was as a project manager for FoE Malta. For me, as for many of the activists I worked with in this protean thing we referred to as FoEI, the world was experienced as a single place. This sense of cosmopolitan belonging is far from unique to FoEI activists. It is held by many environmentalists, for whom it is often associated with the Gaia hypothesis (Milton 2002: 31). Not only do many environmentalists experience the world as an unbounded and differentiated yet commonly shared place, they also feel it should be thought about and treated in this way—that is, if we are to respond well as humans to the various crises of weather, water, food, pollution, safety and loss of habitat that we and the non-humans in our world are experiencing. In fact, in the last few decades, what are marked as global crises have become primary concerns for people and institutions (Beck 1992). Environmentalists have played an important role in bringing these concerns to the forefront (Beck 1992; Giddens 1994; Berglund 1998; Castells 1996; Boissevain and Gatt 2011).

Immediately, anthropologists’ alarm bells began ringing, and quite rightly. Anthropological research has revealed how environmentalism has disenfranchised indigenous groups, amongst others (Anderson and Berglund 2003: 5, 10, Adams 2003). The negative effects on Inuit livelihoods brought about by Greenpeace’s anti-seal hunting campaigns are well documented, to the point that Greenpeace was compelled to change its position on seal hunting and now supports Inuit hunting practices.³ Even where environmentalists do not have as much influence as Greenpeace, they may still be the powerful elites of the future, as Anderson and Berglund (2003) warned more than ten years ago. This is precisely the critique levelled at large transnational conservationist NGOs today (Larsen 2016), and it is particularly important for two reasons. The first lies in an assumption of scale built into the environmentalist drive to consider the world as a commonly shared place, in which events happening locally are defined as having global import. Anna Tsing writes that “[i]n these times of heightened attention to the space and scale of human undertakings, economic projects cannot limit themselves to conjuring at different scales—they must conjure the scales themselves. In this sense, a project that makes us imagine globality in order to see how it might succeed is one kind of ‘scale-making project’ ” (Tsing 2005: 57). When activists conjure this global scale, we also need to ask which scales are being discounted? What other topologies may be obscured by the appeal to the global? The second reason, related to the question of scale, lies in assumptions about difference: how is difference recognised, understood, brought into play in the work and encounters that are counted as ‘FoEI’? What work is alterity made to do in the strategies and tactics involved in the transnational world of NGOs and activism?

Anthropological analysis and questioning has always meant formulating ontological proposals, even if entirely implicitly. By offering an explanation or description, a writer is inevitably presenting one possible ontology rather than another, no matter how implicitly or unintentionally. What we have seen more recently is an explicit debate over ontological matters. This may be part of a widespread concern with ontology that exceeds the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology. Mario Blaser suggests that “[t]he present moment can be most fruitfully understood as marked by the increasingly visible and generalised ontological conflicts that are associated with the struggle to shape the global age as an alternative to, rather than a continuation of, modernity” (2010: 1). Ontological conflicts are central to the times because they reveal that there already exist alternatives to modernity and “because they force modernity to reshape itself in order to deal with radical difference” (Escobar 2008: 2). To adopt Blaser’s terminology, the stories FoEI activists tell about the global environment participate in these ontological conflicts, and in making globalization itself, in a very tangible way. This making of globality is carried out a great deal through discourse but is definitely not limited to it. FoEI activists’ sense of globality participates in ways that I will explore in this book, in making globalization in the ontological sense that their actions and understandings of and in the world have effects in generating that very world.

The global scale that FoEI activists have been campaigning about for the last forty years has now gained immense traction within scholarly circles in the debates around the so-called Anthropocene. Introduced by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene is supposed to denote a new geological era in which human actions, more than other forces, define the global environment. The Anthropocene describes an “environmental globalism” in which “it is virtually impossible to disentangle the social and the natural” (White 1999: 979). However, the term, and the ontological assumptions it carries, risks undermining the onto-political work of FoEI.

Scholars have criticised its implied anthropocentrism, but as Sayre notes, these critics have nevertheless continued to use the term and “seemingly grant it de facto conceptual purchase” (Sayre 2012: 61–62).

The consequences that come along with the Anthropocene thesis, namely, that if humans have unwittingly become a telluric force reshaping the planet, how are they going to consciously steer away from its pernicious consequences? This raises the question of politics par excellence, that is, how can be constituted the collective subject that will address this challenge and in which ways will do it?

(Blaser nd)

The attention to difference that emerges from my work with FoEI requires a focus on politics and power, specifically due to the questions of ontological politics that FoEI activists have long been engaged in, although in FoEI terminology this is referred to as ‘cultural justice’. A focus on politics and power is not only relevant but necessary for a critical exploration, since so much of environmentalist discourse is pitched in depoliticised terms (Latour 2003; Little 1999; Fischer 1997). In this discourse activist groups, especially non-governmental organisations (NGOs), are regarded as being benevolent and non-political, especially due to their independence of the state and profit-making economic activity (Fischer 1997). Other strategies mobilised by environmentalist organisations depoliticise the issues at hand by, for instance, defining matters as ‘technical’ (Müller 2011, 2013), or by justifying their actions in terms of using necessary ‘evil means’ for ‘good ends’ (Larsen 2016). Environmentalists in the NGO context strive for legitimacy as authorities on the management of land, resources and morality, based on their scientific expertise and benevolent intentions (Gatt 2001; Lister 2003; Choy 2005). However, it has also been found that environmental degradation is most acute where inhabitants belong to subordinate, politically muted social groups within a society (Bullard 1994). The work of activists and the situations in which activism arises are inevitably underpinned by power struggles, but as I will discuss in more detail in a subsequent section, exploring the questions about power that the specifically ‘global’ experiences and striving of FoEI activists raise requires that we think about the forms, and rhetorical strategies, that our scholarly arguments take.

Here it is necessary to return to the question of familiarity in relation to ontological politics. How the anthropologist defines their own belonging in relation to the context of fieldwork affects the form their scholarly argument will take: Closeness or familiarity can also make evident the great degree of variation in the ‘West’, a term and imaginary which often functions as a foil for anthropological analyses of ‘the rest’ (Chua and Mathur 2017). Both Orientalism and Occidentalism take shape by eliding the particularities and heterogeneity of the ways of life within the territories supposedly in question (ibid). Once we begin to pay attention to the infinite variation in every circumstance, the rhetorical devices of contrast (us and them, the West and the rest), and the strawmen they construct, lose their persuasiveness.

Recalling Viveiros de Castro’s injunction to take others seriously: focusing on the experiences of FoEI activists and their questioning of the global means also taking seriously thoughts and concepts that originate in the ‘West’. Viveiros de Castro’s own formulation, dependent as it is on opposing different ‘worlds’ (Graeber 2015), makes ‘taking seriously’ hard to apply to one’s own concepts, at least without qualification (Candea 2010). Not only is it necessary to acknowledge the actual effect that concepts originating from Europe or the United States can have on the rest of the world, and in so doing to recognise coloniality (Blaser 2010; Escobar 2008) and global inequalities (McGill 2016), but also to take serious ethnographic interest in otherwise anthropologically suspect things such as ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘individualism’ and ‘universals’ reveals that none of these concepts and discourses, nor the ways of life in which they participate, are or ever were hermetically sealed, ‘pure’ or homogeneous. Back and forth influences across multiple places have been present throughout history. In fact, in trying to make this argument, I find myself in a similar position as FoEI activists themselves, striving to ‘take seriously’ the ontological politics of other FoEI activists from all around the world, without having one’s own voice drowned out.⁴

The particular challenge FoEI activists face is how to develop joint policies for FoEI, a federation that not only includes very diverse forms of environmentalism and understandings of ‘the environment’ and ‘the world’ but, as a matter of principle, also promotes that diversity. The challenge is always present in any FoEI or FoE group campaign. In their campaigns, activists endeavour to convince their various target audiences, such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), national governments, shareholders of multinational corporations, a member group’s national public, and so on, that their policies and their mediation will improve the world shared by all humans and all non-humans alike. Explaining the difference between environmentalist and non-environmentalist ideas, as Argyrou (2005: 5) does, by appeal to their historical and cultural specificity, or by putting things in their historical and cultural contexts, can account neither for conflict or disagreement (Asad 1979), nor for how we can become aware of and learn about difference in the first place (Ingold 1993).⁵

The activists I worked with are convinced that different human ways of life have actual effects in a single common world that we all share. Those ways of life often result in oppression or destruction of other people and non-human environments. Activists are highly attentive to ontological politics also in the sense that they take seriously each other’s relationships with non-humans. In this book, I explore different dimensions of power in the daily lives and work of FoEI activists, in their dealings with both humans and non-humans: How can one simultaneously take into account these different dimensions (material agency, personal agency, impersonal structures, symbolic and institutional power, etc.) within a shared world? The question is how to conceptualise different forms of power simultaneously, without explaining one form in terms of another, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Environmentalism, Globality and Anthropology in our Common World
• 2 Proposing an Imaginary: Fields of Forces, Vectors and Direction of Attention
• 3 Field Methods, Emplacement and Scale: Where Is FoEI?
• 4 Chronological History and Organic Time: Being Introduced to FoEI
• 5 Striving for an Exemplary Life: Becoming an Environmentalist
• 6 Rhythms of Globality: Developing a Sense of Belonging to FoEI
• 7 Communication Technologies and Presence: Being in Touch in FoEI
• 8 The Effectiveness of Structure: Vectors at Work in a Transnational Federation
• 9 Experiments with Political Form and Process
• 10 Epilogue: Keeping the Conversation Open
• References
• Index