From TINA to TAMA:

There are many kinds of resistance to the flattening effects of runaway overheated globalisation. Some yearn for purity and boundaries, while others celebrate contamination. This short text consists of notes for forthcoming writings. Thinking allowed about thinking aloud is permitted at this stage. It is a companion text to the fictionalised autoethnography ‘Natureculture permutations’.

The political agents resisting the Homogenocene are of a different kind to those typically studied by political scientists. Since the reduction of diversity is caused by governments and corporate interests, it is necessary to look elsewhere for signs of resistance. I will take a brief look at some of them, but let’s keep in mind that although they may have comparable objectives, they work in different settings and on different scales. The plurality of movements working to retain local autonomy and healthy ecosystems effectively falsifies the TINA (There Is No Alternative) doctrine popularised in the 1980s by showing that as a matter of fact, TAMA (There Are Many Alternatives).

One such proposed alternative is rewilding. Rewilding Europe, an NGO starting in 2011, has partnered with governments and sponsors with the aim to restore ecosystems that have been affected by global homogenisation. At the time of this writing, Rewilding Europe has eight active projects, from Portugal to Swedish Lapland. Restoration of ecosystems also takes other forms, and it is practised on many scales. In Tasmania, for example, civil society volunteers spend Sundays removing invasive shrubs – some of which were deliberately imported for their beauty as late as the 1970s – from the landscape, trying to strengthen the relative position of endemic plants. Further north, in Queensland, ‘toadbusting’ is an organised activity for volunteers in many locations, where the aim is to curb the spread of the deliberately imported, but now invasive and destructive, cane toad, originally a Central American species. On a slightly larger scale, the transformation of South African farms into game parks has led to the reintroduction of animals – mainly herbivores, but also big cats in a few cases – to regions where they had been driven to extinction in historical times. An unknown concept at the turn of the millennium, rewilding is now being recognised as a tool of what we might call ‘salvage ecology’.

The greater semiotic freedom of humans, compared to other species, entails above all self-consciousness and reflexivity. Hence, although the European bison (part of a rewilding project in Kent) cannot represent itself – it must be represented – people can, and they do. Lien (2021) describes a court case concerning land rights in northern Scandinavia, involving the Norwegian state and Sami reindeer herders. One of the herders, called as a witness in court, was asked to identify the location of his migratory route on a map. He refused, explaining its location instead by describing geographical and topological features, affirming that he had never needed to use maps. The literature on Sami ways of engaging with the world is substantial, much of it written by Sami scholars who thus function as cultural brokers. Sami land rights activists emphasise traditional forms of stewardship based on tradition rather than law, and many Sami also show a different way of relating to their environment, a different cosmology and view of social relations than that which is dominant in majority Nordic society (Eriksen, Valkonen & Valkonen 2019).

Other indigenous groups are in a weaker bargaining position. Wilhite and Salinas (2019) have showed how indigenous groups in South America as well as India find themselves at the sharp end of the stick in three respects: by being deprived of their land and livelihood, by losing their option of cultural reproduction, and as victims of climate change. There are nevertheless positive examples from the Global South as well of indigenous groups mobilising successfully to retain their right to define and govern themselves. The most famous example is probably that of the Yanomami in Brazil, who were given rights to a territory of 99,000 square kilometres (twice the size of Denmark) by the Brazilian government in 1992. In recent years, the autonomous territory has nonetheless been invaded by thousands of garimpeiros, goldminers, with the tacit support of the Bolsanaro government.

Another form of resistance, described by Conversi (2021), is represented by faith-based communities such as Amish, who actively choose to stay aloof from mainstream capitalist state society. Both small-scale indigenous groups and these alternative communities (ecovillages could also be mentioned) are downscaled politically, with limited participation in the monetary economy, and they are ecologically sustainable. Hendry (2014), an anthropologist, has surveyed small-scale stateless societies with a view to glean insights into the kind of ecological thinking and practice that could contribute to changing the course of history away from certain catastrophe.

Yet considering the size and complexity of the human population (36 per cent of the planetary mammalian biomass is now human), there can be no return to the Garden of Eden, which does not mean that there are not useful lessons to be learned from indigenous cosmologies and small-scale countercultures. Significantly, all attempts to reinstate some of the lost diversity has an element of downscaling. For example, Conversi and Friis Hau (2021) present and compare left-leaning secessionist parties in European countries, notably Scotland and Catalonia, which are favourable to radical climate policies. They identify a shift from a national romanticism glorifying the purity and authenticity of local nature to a pragmatic, concrete and demanding climate policy for the present.

The final example is that of the Creole Garden project in the Seychelles, where cultural specificity and biodiversity are at play simultaneously. A pilot project funded by the UNESCO, the Creole Garden aims to recover knowledge about crops and foods that can be grown locally. Ironically, the Creole garden arose from plantation slavery, but as a side-effect deemed uninteresting by the plantation owners, but essential for the slaves, who grew a variety of crops on their tiny plots for subsistence.

However, as the project proposal explains, and I quote it at some length,

with modernity and the advent of supermarkets and flats and housing estates replacing the traditional creole community, the Creole Garden has lost ground and is not being transmitted to the younger generation.

And yet, the Creole Garden provides sustenance, traditional creole culinary skills and ingredients which are the basis of the celebrated creole cuisine in tourism, as well as medicinal plants that reduce the need to go to the doctor. During the Covid-19 lockdown period in Seychelles, our dependency on imported goods became glaringly clear as planes suddenly reduced to essential cargo, and certain fresh vegetables that were flown in every day became scarce. People started planting in pots if they lived in flats, and those who had land began planting typical creole foodstuff such as plantains, dessert bananas, yam, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and herbs. (University of Seychelles 2021)

The Creole garden project brings many of the strands of the argument together. (1) It came about – somewhat ironically – as an unintentional effect of plantation slavery and the beginnings of the Homogenocene. (2) It rejects quests for purity, instead focusing on what works in the local ecology regardless of its origins. (3) It is small scale, scaled down to the household level. (4) The Creole garden combines a concern with biodiversity with the objective of saving Creole culture from oblivion at a time of Netflix and the smartphone. (5) The project is critical of the homogenising tendencies of large-scale production and distribution; in effect, it seeks to replace tinned food, imported mangoes and carrots with locally grown produce. This kind of project may well turn out to be an exemplar for a politics of the Anthropocene.

The question I’m raising concerns politics, specified as the political, looking not to established political institutions, but rather towards political actions and projects engaged in by activists, NGOs and citizens wishing to contribute to political change. Since the contradictions of the overheated Homogenocene are the collateral damage of the state and the globalised fossil fuel economy, solutions must be sought elsewhere. This should not be taken to mean that only localised, or even grassroots movements are the only viable alternative. International agreements such as the ambitious UN Convention on Biological Diversity can be significant, but as the negative experiences of the Kyoto Agreement indicate, they are worthless unless implemented, and most governments have chosen not to do so. For this reason, a politics aiming to counteract the destructive effects of the global fossil fuel industry and the accompanying impoverishment of the biosphere and cultural diversity of the planet should mainly aim to scale down, but sideways scaling through networks of localised initiatives is also a highly relevant option, which can now be achieved, somewhat paradoxically, by means of the very same electronic technology which is also a powerful cause of standardisation.