Ecologies of Globalization
Mountain Governance & Multinatural Planetary Politics
By Rafi Youatt
Mountains around the world are increasingly seen as a kind of global singular, much like global climate, global oceans, global forests, and global biodiversity. As natural spaces and places of human habitation, they are also increasingly under threat from a variety of forces – the warming planet is changing their ecosystems drastically, while increased development pressures and resource extraction affect people and nature alike. These threats bring together a range of actors in global mountain governance, working at different scales, and sometimes with very different understandings and worlds.
The planetary scale is frequently invoked as a singularity, while the scales of political action are invariably smaller and multiple. Yet when this scale touches back down, it sometimes also redraws the ways we understand the places themselves.
As a way of approaching the larger themes of the edited book Nonhuman Nature and World Politics, and considering how planetary politics relates to issues both abstract and concrete in regional environmental and development regimes, this chapter focuses on the ecologies of globalization in mountains – it suggests that there is much that is laudable about these efforts, but also that there are some aspects of it, both conceptual and practical, that might be rethought in ways that might better serve the longer term goals of planetary politics – to address ecological issues and social justice questions together, while also dealing with the exigencies of a multi-society political world and one in which nature itself may not always be a singular category or reality, as we so often assume.
The chapter makes three key arguments in this direction, before looking briefly at a case study of mountain governance in the Himalayas at the tricorner region between Nepal, India, and China. The first has to do with the politics of scale in planetary politics – I suggest that the planetary scale is frequently (and rightly) invoked as a singularity, while the scales of political action are invariably smaller and multiple. This is what allows the Himalayas to be considered in the same breath as the Andes, the Rockies, and the Urals, and in some respects they share in commonalities. Yet when this scale touches back down, it sometimes also redraws the ways we understand the places themselves, and in ways that do not always square with the ways that people there understand the mountains, or engage adequately with other political scales such as the international, as Olaf Corry’s concluding chapter in the book rightly points out. So what I think we need to keep in view in planetary politics is how those different scales work in relation to each other – sometimes productively, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes not at all – and to be attentive to the idea that sometimes, the mountain (or other parts of nature) that is under consideration is not the same thing to all people, or to all nonhuman species involved.
It may seem paradoxical that in order to acknowledge the power of planetary forces, we need to think about nature in more plural terms…perhaps such an approach is the best acknowledgement of how deeply the planetary scale pervades every aspect of our lives, political realities, and interspecies relations.
A second claim in the chapter has to do with the invocation of sacredness in disputed environmental contexts, to mark a terrain as worthy of special treatment, such as a sacred landscape – one which on the one hand offers a certain exemption from politics in order to save the environment, but on the other also ignores the practical, secular environmental knowledge embedded in ostensibly religious knowledge, while convincing us we are all dealing with one nature, multiple cultures. While I appreciate the strategic use of sacredness in this way by a number of environmental movements and particularly indigenous land movements around the world, I wonder whether its translation and use in the policy spaces of environmental governance is as useful. I also wonder whether its emphasis on the exceptionality of the sacred mountain paradoxically permits an ongoing exploitation of the nonsacred spaces.
And third, taking a cue from mountains themselves, I emphasize the positive potentialities that come from thinking about mountains (and nature in general) as plural entities with multiple faces that can never be fully seen by any one actor, yet nonetheless can be linked together. It may seem paradoxical that in order to acknowledge the power of planetary forces, we need to think about nature in more plural terms, alongside singular ones – but perhaps such an approach, and also a less anthropocentric one, is the best acknowledgement of how deeply the planetary scale pervades every aspect of our lives, political realities, and interspecies relations (which I consider in greater depth in a recent book) that we approach with nature with the same great nuance and attention to multiplicity that we do with human societies.
This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
