Wild Politics: A philosophy of sustainability

 

Susan Hawthorne

Sustainability has become a buzz word and in becoming so, it is being emptied of meaning. In this paper I look at the early work that Maria Mies writes about in The Lace Makers of Narsapur, research she carried out in India in the late 1970s and early 1980s.(1) I look at the connections between the dispossession of women in precarious work alongside the impact of the Green Revolution on farmers and people who’ve relied on forests for their livelihood. Finally, I look at the growth of the prostitution industry and its use of women for developing economies.

Sustainability is not simply about greening up a life style, it is an overturning, a revolution in living. I argue that we need to develop a wild politics, a position in which we take account of the complexity of existence, the recognition of local knowledge and a radical feminist outlook informed by a multiversalist approach to knowledge.

An important feminist axiom is ‘the personal is political’ and real sustainability is achieved by putting that into action: from methods of farming, fishing and forestry, to forms of work and play, as well as international systems such as trade rules, conventions and human rights law.

In the last three decades, women have been very hard hit by globalisation, but a new worrying form of globalisation is emerging, that which is tied to weasel words to make globalisation sound friendly. Among the weasel words being used are sustainability; green agriculture; rainforest foundation; sex work. These weasel words, like Orwell speak, mean the opposite of what they pretend to say. Sustainability when used in this way means ‘it will last long enough for us to make a profit and run’; ‘green agriculture’ is a relative of the ‘green revolution’ in which agriculture what made hostage to pesticides, mechanisation, fertilisers, irrigation (Akhter 2012: 2), today’s version claims to be anti-pesticide while polluting with GM crops under the guise of ‘solving world hunger’ or handing farming over to non-foods such as tobacco, flowers and cotton for the export market; ‘rainforest foundation’ is a local version where bioprospecting is carried out in the guise of saving the cassowary and individuals are encouraged to buy one square metre of land and donate it to the foundation; ‘sex work’ is paraded as work when it is really exploitation of women with severe adverse effects on their health but is seen as adding to the GDP of poor countries, some exploit domestically, others export the women who have been commodified.

How globalisation divides women

Because women are still the largest class of poor people in the world,(2) as a social group they represent an important touchstone for the effects of globalisation. Women are the invisible victims of so many of these new systems of structural violence.

Work, for example, is promoted as one of the areas in which, through globalisation, women have most to gain. Sadie Plant (1997, pp.  42-43) suggests that women, because they are “better culturally and psychologically” prepared for the work habits of the new millennium, will outdo their male counterparts in a more highly technologised world. Plant’s argument is echoed by Christa Wichterich (1999, p.  5) who, writing with a different intention, states: “Cheap, dexterous and flexible, they [women] have a competitive advantage over men in meeting the new requirements of the labor market.”

Perhaps the earliest analysis of women’s work in the global economy is Maria Mies’ classic text, The Lace Makers of Narsapur (2012). In this book she examines the way in which poor women in India are used to produce luxury goods (lace) for the Western market. The women work 12-hour days, at the lowest pay, without any possibility of collective bargaining because they are dispersed piece workers. They are neither counted as workers nor as producers even through in the chain of production it is their work that all the others gain their livings from. Instead the women are referred to as ‘non-working housewives’ and their work as ‘leisure-time activity’.

As Maria Mies indicates:

the lace exporters [men] and merchants [men] accumulate capital because they are able to appropriate the lace workers’ necessary labour (2012: 171).

In other words, men are able to appropriate the work of women and make a profit whereas the women continue to live in poverty. The profiteers are the exporters of women’s labour and what that means is that the productive work of women leaves the community in which the women work, so that the community too is impoverished.

Women working in agriculture have been subjected to similar forces as the lace makers. A significant number of women’s farming activities have been mechanised and handed to men who were given tractors which in turn destroyed the systems of intercropping that women had developed and turned over the healthy soil to cash crop exports followed by deterioation of soils through the use of fertilisers and pesticides.

Another important area to look at is the work of women in forests. Women around the world are engaged in harvesting forests in different ways, they include Indigenous women as well as peasants, small farmers and even poor town dwellers who can sometimes make productive use of forest produce. In Europe, the forest was traditionally an area of commons, until the development of forestry. What forestry did to forests is what industrialisation did to factories. In 1820, Julius von Brinken visited Lithuania where bisons still roamed. Brinken desired a ‘methodical forestry’ that would create a ‘proper hierarchy’ in which ‘specimens of a like variety and maturity would present themselves in tidy battalions ready for their marching orders’ (cited in Hawthorne 2002: 226, my emphasis).

The forests were removed from people and turned into industrial sites where clear-felling and plantations destroyed biodiversity. For many peoples the forests had been places of knowledge, even where forests were protected, as in national parks, the relationship between people and forests was broken as the people were chased from areas protected for the use of the well-heeled and turned into show places. Indigenous people have had their forests taken from them in the main. In India this is a contentious issue and Vandana Shiva in her forthcoming book, Making Peace with the Earth writes:

Another misconception is that recognising forest rights of tribals will dismantle existing forest management and wildlife protection laws. This is a product of the either/or point of view, which leads to the polarised perception that either tribals can have rights, or state institutions can have powers; either we can have local governance or national regulation (2012: manuscript p. 113).

Farida Akhter in Bangladesh in her study Women and Trees (1990) noted that the poorest families were the most productive in their use of trees:

[They] plant more trees utilising the minimum land which they have. They take care of plants and trees more eagerly not only because  nature is their immediate source or subsistence but also because they understand the importance of trees for the environment (Akhter 1990: 37).

The forests are also important sources of medicines all around the world and much of that medicinal knowledge was held by women. These days Western corporations come in to forests to do bioprospecting. This knowledge is exported and appropriated by pharmaceutical corporations who go on to make massive profits. Some of you might know the local organisation, the Rainforest Foundation. They have bioprospectors on their board, along with hunters, military men, and marketers.

Michael Dove who has worked with forest peoples in Indonesia argues that the dominant members of the culture – the transnational sector – appropriate the valuable resources while leaving those considered worthless in the hands of the powerless forest peoples. He writes:

[In Indonesia] forest people develop a resource for the market, and if and when this resource attains sufficient importance, central economic and political interests assume control of it, based on self-interest rhetorically disguised as the common good (1993, p. 20).

Dove’s observation applies to resources developed by women, often developed because there is a domestic or local need for the product or for the ways of spreading knowledge.

The lace makers in towns, the foresters and healers are drawn into the market economy by the corporations. Women have been incrdibly resistant to joining the market economy and generally the drive comes from poverty.

The latest manifestation of this is drawing women into the market economy via the sex industry. In the case of the lace makers, their labour is commodified; in the case of forest peoples, their knowledge is commodified; in the case of prostituted women, their bodies are commodified.

There is an interesting intersection in the global economy between the international mobility of elites and the increasing availability of women. The World Sex Guide Home Page has a header: “Where do you want to fuck today?” (Hughes, 1999, p. 159).  Like the lands the colonisers acquired so cheaply, and like the bioprospectors, mobile men want to pick up women wherever they are. They can even find out about the local conditions, and like the others prospectors,(3) report back to their colleagues over the Internet.

Women are increasingly produce to be sold at home and for export as sex cash crops, as trafficked goods, as cash flow for paying debt and all this is at the recommendation of the UN, the World Bank and the International Labor Organisation (ILO).

Although it may appear that bodies are very different from lace making, farming and forests, many of the same principles are applied to women’s bodies.  Governments have not been slow in recognising this and as Raymond (1998, p. 2) points out, in 1998 Belize “Recognized prostitution...[as] a gender-specific form of migrant labor that serves the same economic functions for women as agricultural work offers to men, and often for better pay.”

The other connecting element in all of this is militarisation. Export and exploitative labour of all kinds, especially the products of exotic peoples in far away places is only possible after colonisation and after the ‘natives’ have been subdued. Colonisation is followed by marketing and export. The British navy deforested many places just to get enough wood for their ships. And prostitution is rife anywhere there is war or colonisation. Women are taken, they are raped, they are sold and worse.

Military thinking is at the base of all these forms of exploitation. They are used to pay off ‘third world’ debt but all they result in is increased indebtedness, alienation, disconnection and dispossession from knowledge of local conditions, from land, from satisfying and sustainable work. Work for profit on this global scale does nothing for women.

Wild Politics: Toward a Bio/Diverse Future

Wild politics is based on systems thinking that is grounded in the local. It puts relationships, life and connection first. Wild politics is inspired by biodiversity and attempts to bring that inspiration to play into human and social contexts.

What might genuine sustainability mean in a world in which my model of wild politics operated? Just briefly, what I mean by ‘wild politics’ is this:

A politics grounded in the local. A philosophy of wild politics puts relationships, life and connection first. Wild politics is inspired by biodiversity, and attempts to bring inspiration to play into human and social contexts (Hawthorne 2002: 389).

Disconnection is structured into the system of neoclassical economics. It is disconnected from the world, or as Ida Dominijanni puts it, it is “immunization from contact with others” (2003, 2). It pays little attention to the relationships between economic players, including relationships of power, knowledge, access to resources and the like. Disconnection from the biophysical world and from land also characterises industrial and biotechnological farming systems, a system currently undergoing huge expansion through the proliferation of agribusiness, aquaculture and plantation forestry corporations. Not only do corporate industrial and biotechnological farming industries pay scant attention to sustainability, they also regard every failure of the environment as a new business opportunity. So land affected by salinity opens the way for salt-resistant crops; the Kyoto Protocol opens the way for carbon trading by companies such as Toyota who are investing in fast-growing GM trees, allowing them to trade double the number of carbon credits rather than attending to emissions problems (Langelle, 2001).

Disconnection is structured into urban environments, and the architecture and transport systems reflect the overwhelming importance of cars with entertainment, shopping and sporting venues widely separated from one another. In the global economy, work is disconnected, dislocated and dehumanised. It matters little whether people are employed, unemployed or over-employed, disconnection still holds sway. New forms of exploitation such as Lingerie Football League are touted as sport, while photographs of naked children are touted as art. Both involve emotional disconnection between the viewer and the viewed.

Continuous war, free trade agreements and a host of new multilateral agreements based on universalising western systems of thought are becoming the final arbiters of what is and is not possible in the world (Hawthorne, 2003). These agreements affect artisans, farmers, women in export zones, trafficked women, refugees, the chronically ill and disabled, as well as the poor and the unemployable – whatever national or indigenous group they belong to.
I propose a new politics, wild politics, one which signals a culture whose inspiration is biodiversity. I have used the word wild because it brings together a range of possibilities for a developing politics. In genetics, the term “wild types” refers to unregulated genetic structures. It is a characteristic shared by most members of a species under “natural conditions”. This commonality is also the source of our diversity. Diversity, unconstrained by human interference, is critical to the continuing biological diversity of the planet.

The inspiration of wild politics is biodiversity. An appeal to biodiversity allows one to systematically weigh up whether any action or behaviour or way of seeing the world results in the possibility of long-term sustainability of the world. Lilla Watson in 1984, in a talk on “Aboriginal Women and Feminism”, commented that for Aboriginal people in Australia the future extends as far forward as the past. In that case, she said, we have a 40,000-year plan. Such a long-term view is part of a vision of a world based on wild politics. Wild politics is the view that diversity is central to the existence of life, to the sustenance of the planet, and to the health of human society.

Biodiversity implies activity and participation, as opposed to disconnected domination. The “wild type” in the genetic sense cannot be genetically modified, for to do so results in it no longer being a “wild type”. Resistance to appropriation is structured into the philosophy of wild politics.

Biodiversity takes account of each and every player in a system, no matter how small. Ecologically speaking, the microorganisms in the soil are as important as the peak predators. The system of globalisation rewards only the peak predators. Indeed, interconnectedness is central to a system based on biodiversity. No part of the whole can be changed without it affecting every other part, nor can biodiversity be easily reversed. Such a view is anathema to the biotechnology industry that would have us believe that humanity can constantly intervene in and control nature (including biodiversity) without any concern for consequences.

In a world enlivened by wild politics, work could become an activity that leaves the world a richer place, in much the same way that the earthworm, by aerating the soil through which it passes, leaves the soil enriched. If “biodiversity [were] the logic of production” (Shiva, 1993, p. 146), the nature of production would change. Export processing zones would be unthinkable. Inhuman wages and working conditions would be counterproductive. Biotechnology would not fill the spaces of previous technological and social failures; instead, self-sustaining systems could be developed, systems which contribute to the community rather than leading to social, cultural and economic impoverishment.

In such a world, trade would not cease. And consumption would take place as a means of generating relationship rather than profit. The international rules of trade and the dynamics of negotiation would need to be overhauled, and the language of equal access changed to reflect equitable outcomes. The actions of the G21 nations could be seen as a first step in this approach.

If the wild were the driving force of culture, the world would function in very different ways. In this new world biodiversity would become the inspiration for the culture, the defining spirit. This spirit would result in very different behaviours and institutions at both local and global levels, and the creation of a particular kind of thought. It would result in a very different relationship with the world, one that would make it difficult to destroy land by mining, bombing, industrial farming or commercial development, all of which are predicated on profit and disrespect.

With relationship considered more important than profit, there would be great reluctance to exploit simply for short-term gain. It would be against the culture. In a world of wild politics, it would not be possible to develop and market terminator seeds, GMOs, molecular colonisation, biotechnologies and reproductive technologies, sexualised sport and art all of which violate women’s bodies, since these would be perceived as deeply destructive. The vicious cycle of technological failure followed by a business opportunity followed by yet another technological fix/failure would be broken. These and other cycles of violence would be replaced by a system which focuses instead on life-oriented outcomes, on systems which are premissed on a germinating matrix, wild type. In a world enlivened by wild politics, members of the diversity matrix are the hope for the future. Within wild politics are new ways of thinking, and in this quest for new behaviours and institutions are also the seeds of a future which will hold dear to the driving force of wildness, and a politics that grows out of this longing.

What I hope for is a world filled with richness, texture, depth and meaning. I want diversity with all its surprises and variety. I want an epistemological multiversity which values the context and real-life experiences of people. I want a world in which relationship is important and reciprocity is central to social interaction. I want a world that can survive sustainably for at least 40,000 years. I want a wild politics.

 

1.    This book was first published in 1982, the current edition (2012) has been released as a Spinifex Feminist Classic.

2.    People with disabilities also suffer high levels of poverty, as do any people who belong to minorities, despised or marginalised groups. In all of these groups, however, women are usually more affected by poverty than are men.

3.    The term prospector has some interesting resonances. A prospector is one who makes a claim, and is associated with claiming parcels of land, ore bodies or goods with prospects. A prospectus is an account showing the forthcoming likely profits of a venture as a means of obtaining support. As a noun a prospect is a view of the landscape from any position; and when applied to time it is a view which looks toward the future.

 

 

References

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