Week 8 Brainstorm - Zahra McKee

I think that these readings do a great job highlighting the importance of investing in nature and planet earth, not just for environmental reasons, but for cultural ones as well. In Afro and Indigenous Life– Visions in/and Politics. (De)colonial Perspectives in Bolivia and Ecuador, author Catherine Walsh lays out how indigenous communities often have tighter bonds to nature not because they are primitive or decivilized, but because there are strong cultural beliefs in the tie between la pachamama and humans. The reading says that “in contrast to Western ways of thinking, there is no division between humans and nature; the equilibrium, development, and survival of society rests in this harmonic relation of integration” (56). This lack of division between people and the planet explains the significance of the constitutional rights granted to nature in Ecuador. According to Andrew Revkin’s article Ecuador Grants Constitutional Rights to Nature, this new law proclaims that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution” (1). Preserving the earth and giving it rights is just as necessary as human rights, especially when framed by the unity between nature and humans in indigenous and afro cultures. This type of thought brings people together for the benefit of the planet and additionally asserts equality between humans. Walsh explains that “by  sustaining  the  belief  that  we  are  brothers  and  sisters  connected by  a  greater  order―that is, by nature or Mother Earth― and that differences  are  not  valuative  in  the  sense  of  superior  and  inferior,  this cosmovision, philosophy, or life–vision looks to link and unite rather than fragment and divide.” (58). This “connection by a greater order aligns with the concepts of convivencia and togetherness as well as Chicanxfuturist ideas of envisioning a new past/future.