Ecoregionalism
When I announced the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project, I claimed that the project was an anti-imperialist project.
To make this claim meaningful, I cited Ivan Illich from Tools for Conviviality on the three prevailing modes of imperialism, each successive mode being more insidious and intractable than the last. First, Illich described a nationalist imperialism characterized by “the pernicious spread of one nation beyond its boundaries.” Second, Illich described a capitalist imperialism characterized by “the omnipresent influence of multinational corporations.” Third, and finally, Illich described a careerist imperialism, the most insidious and intractable of the three, characterized by “the mushrooming of professional monopolies over production.”
After citing Illich, I wrote that, as have come to see it, the antidote to a nationalist imperialism is a ecoregionalism, the antidote to a capitalist imperialism is a communism, and the antidote to a careerist imperialism is a dilettantism. In turn, I wrote that the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project would be an exercise in dilettantism, supplemented by exercises in ecoregionalism and communism, that would serve to generate antidotes to careerist imperialisms. Thus far, I have written a good deal about dilettantism as an antidote to careerist imperialisms and about communism as an antidote to capitalist imperialisms, but I have yet to write much about ecoregionalism as an antidote to nationalist imperialisms.
This week, the nation of Russia attacked the nation of Ukraine in what is widely and rightly being regarded as a brazen act of nationalist imperialism. The liberal news media in the West has tended to criticize Russia’s actions in the name of the sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine, taking the inviolability of sovereign national territories for granted. Reading and watching all of this as it unfolds, I have been thinking that more is lost than gained when we take the inviolability of sovereign national territories for granted.
In this dispatch, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism otherwise than affirming the inviolability of sovereign national territories. In brief, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism by affirming nations’ shared concern for ecoregions and by affirming more or less permeable ecoregional boundaries.
What do I mean when I use the term “nation”, “nationalism”, and “nationalist imperialism”?
To answer this question, I will need to quote an extended passage from my previous dispatch on ethnocide and ecocide, marking the distinctions between genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide.
Genocide is the extermination of one or more determinate ancestries effected by and through the eradication of individuals belonging to the given ancestries. The fact that genocide primarily targets individuals, depriving individuals of their liberties and their lives, makes genocide easy for the liberal minded to recognize and decry as an atrocity. What makes it difficult for the liberal minded to recognize and decry ethnocide and ecocide is the fact that the targets of ethnocide and ecocide are not individuals but pre-individual processes and supra-individual structures.
Ethnocide is the extermination of one or more determinate cultures effected by and through the inhibition of the pre-individual processes and the destruction of the supra-individual structures that together constitute the given cultures. Ethnocide and genocide do not necessarily imply one another insofar as a given ancestry can survive the extermination of its culture and a given culture can survive the extermination of some of its ancestries. This is the case because a person of a given ancestry may not be initiated into the culture of their ancestors, and because a person may be initiated into a given culture without having any ancestral ties to the culture. Regard, for instance, how the ethnocide of Indigenous American peoples occasionally involved genocide but was also effected by other many other means including displacement, re-education, and criminalization. Alternatively, regard how the enslavement of Black peoples in the Americas was ethnocidal without always being genocidal: ancestry needed to be maintained as part and parcel of being Black and being a slave, but being Black and being a slave meant being continually deprived of ties to an ancestral culture. And as final example, regard how White American and European eugenicists conducted a genocide without ethnocide when they endeavored to eradicate the “degenerate” ancestries of the mentally and physically "disabled" from White American and European cultures.
Ecocide is the extermination of one or more determinate habitats effected by the inhibition of the pre-individual processes and the destruction of the supra-individual structures that together constitute the habitats. Ecocide does not necessarily mean genocide for all ancestries with ties to threatened habitats: individuals of a given ancestry may very well survive the extermination of the habitat that nurtured their ancestors. Neither does ecocide necessarily mean ethnocide for cultures with ties to threatened habitats: a nomadic culture, for instance, may very well survive the extermination of one of the different habitats that they occasionally pass through.
I cite the passage above because we often (con)fuse two terms that I have distinguished above when we talk of “nations”: we use the term “nation” to simultaneously refer to a people with a given ancestry and to a people with a given culture. For the purposes of this dispatch, I would like to separate these two subjects of the term “nation”, recognizing full well that these two subjects always defer to one another despite differing from one another.
What I want to propose here is that there is no nation without a national culture, however artificial and superficial that national culture may be. Indeed, I use the term “nation” simply to refer to a population with a more or less determinate culture and, as such, I hold that all nations are ethno-nations and all nationalisms are ethno-nationalisms. That being said, however, to the extent that some determinate cultures will only initiate and integrate individuals into their folds when individuals belong to certain ancestries, it could be said that some nations are geno-nations in addition to being ethno-nations and, concomitantly, some nationalisms are geno-nationalisms in addition to being ethno-nationalisms. For instance, today’s white-supremacist nationalisms are geno-nationalisms in addition to being ethno-nationalisms: individuals who overtly demand respect and, as a historical consequence, reparations for their Black Sub-Saharan African ancestors (or any other oppressed non-White ancestors) are, for that very reason, denied full initiation and integration into the national cultures championed by white-supremacist nationalists.
A given habitat becomes the “territory” of a given nation when the members of a given nation secure privileged access to a given habitat for themselves. In other words, a given habitat becomes the territory of a given nation when more or less stable and non-negotiable power formations provide the members of a given nation privileged access to a given habitat — this feat is achieved via the subordination and/or extermination of all others who occupy a given habitat.
Not all nations possess territories and, what’s more, it cannot even be said that all nations want to possess territories. There are, of course, nomadic nations that make no claims to possessing any of the territories that they pass through, but there are also sedentary nations that do not maintain stable and non-negotiable power formations and, thus, do not turn the habitats that they care for and call home into their own privileged territories. Just consider, for instance, the indigenous nations of North America that initially accommodated the European settlers who took up residence on lands that the indigenous nations could have claimed as their own privileged territory and exclusive property. Later some of these indigenous nations would accommodate and become confluent with settlements of maroons who had fled slavery and formed their own nations without privileged territories.
Nations that neither possess nor want to possess their own privileged territories are “nations-without-nationalisms” — for all nationalisms are claims that nations should possess their own privileged territories. Nations-without-nationalisms are neither rare nor even uncommon, but history tends to overlook them. History tends to be nationalistic, written as the history of territorial and would-be territorial nations. Only territorial nations and would-be territorial nations are said to make “real” history; nations-without-nationalisms, or “non-territorial nations” for short, have been (mis)represented as anthropological curiosities that do not make “real” history apart from resisting or yielding to the offenses of territorial nations.
As I see it, any and every act by and through which a nation makes, maintains, and conquers privileged territories for themselves is an act of nationalist imperialism. This is to say, in other words, that all territorial nations are perpetually engaged in acts of nationalist imperialism insofar as they are all perpetually engaged in making and maintaining their own privileged territories against others. Going further, this also means that the maintenance of a balance of power amongst territorial nations is just as much an act of nationalist imperialism as the upsetting of a balance of power by a territorial nation with hegemonic aspirations. Indeed, riffing on the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the making and maintenance of a balance of power amongst a group of territorial nations is what I call the making and maintenance of Empire with a capital “E”; and the making and maintenance of a single expansionary territorial nation is what I call the making and maintenance of an empire with a lower case “e”. The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is, in these terms, a conflict between empire and Empire — Russia has attacked Ukraine in order to expand its own (little “e”) empire but, in so doing, it is threatening the stability of (capital “E”) Empire.
My anti-imperialist position runs counter to both the (little “e”) empires of particular territorial nations and the (capital “E”) Empire that maintains a balance of power amongst territorial nations. Against both empire and Empire, my anti-imperialist position advances a non-territorial nationhood, a nationhood-without-nationalism, a nationhood that eschews possessing privileged territories. Indeed, opposed to securing separate territories for different nations, my anti-imperialist position favors caring for habitats in such a way that many different nations may share them. I call my anti-imperialist position an ecoregionalism because my position is that the sharing of a habitat or, more broadly, the sharing of an ecoregion formed of contiguous and comparable habitats ought to be the criteria for political kinship — this as opposed to the sharing of a nationality. In other words, my position holds that all nations that share an ecoregion should, by and through sharing an ecoregion, become politically confluent with one another and deferential to one another’s differences. From an ecoregionalist point of view, then, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is not to be criticized as a transgression of Ukraine’s sovereign territory but, rather, it is to be criticized as the advance of a Russian imperialism that would subordinate and/or eliminate the non-Russian peoples (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, etc.) that share in and care for the habitats currently claimed by the nation of Ukraine as privileged national territories.
Map of the Freshwater Ecoregions of the World
“The freshwater ecoregion map encompasses 426 units, whose boundaries generally – though not always – correspond with those of watersheds (also known as drainage basins or catchments). Within individual ecoregions there will be turnover of species, such as when moving up or down a river system, but taken as a whole an ecoregion will typically have a distinct evolutionary history and/or ecological processes.”
When I first introduced the notion of ecoregionalism as part of this project, I quoted an excerpt from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. I will quote it again here.
[Territorial nations] have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen.
[…] Unless regions have the power to be self-governing, they will not be able to solve their own environmental problems. The arbitrary lines of [territorial nations], which often cut across natural regional boundaries, make it all but impossible for people to solve regional problems in a direct and humanly efficient way.
[…] [Furthermore,] unless the present-day great nations have their power greatly decentralized, the beautiful and differentiated languages, cultures, customs, and ways of life of the earth’s people, vital to the health of the planet, will vanish.
Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein strike me as having padded their language quite a bit to soften the landing of their claims. Allow me to remove some of their cushioning in order to land with impact. The “great nations” of our day are powerful engines of ethnocide and ecocide, and all those who wish for cultural and natural diversity to flourish must endeavor to dismantle these “great nations”. This means dismantling both the (little “e”) empires of particular territorial nations and the (capital “E”) Empire that maintains a balance of power amongst territorial nations. While we might occasionally play Empire against empires, let us not deceive ourselves: Empire does not aim to save cultural and natural diversity from empires. To the contrary, Empire aims to optimize ethnocide and ecocide, to make ethnocide and ecocide evermore tolerable by checking the most brazen excesses of empires.
Empire (with a capital “E”) will allow empires (with a little “e”) to pursue their ethnocidal and ecocidal projects unimpeded provided (i) that empires do not step on each other's toes too often as they go about their business and (ii) that empires do not stomp on the necks of conquered peoples in an “uncivilized” manner that egregiously offends Empire’s prevailing sensibilities. Given that Empire’s prevailing sensibilities are, at present, white-supremacist sensibilities, empires are presently allowed much more liberty to stomp harshly on the necks of non-White peoples and much less liberty to stomp harshly on the necks of White peoples.
A White-on-White offense, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a test of Empire’s power to check the excesses of empires. Many worry that Empire, led by the US and its European allies, will fail to check the expansion of the Russian empire and then, by extension, the Chinese empire, and that this will spell the end for Empire as we know it. No one knows what will happen next, but anti-imperialists do know for certain that Empire and empires must both fail to achieve their aims if anti-imperialists are to succeed in achieving theirs. Yet the failure of both Empire and empires does not necessarily spell success for anti-imperialists insofar as anti-imperialists are ecoregionalists. More would be lost than gained if Empire and empires were to decimate cultural and natural diversity in the process of frustrating each other’s aims — this is to say, in other words, that anti-imperialists will only gain if Empire and empires frustrate each other’s aims without harming cultural and natural diversity. Given this, anti-imperialists have little chance of gaining anything from the current crisis in Ukraine, which only serves to test Empire’s wherewithal to check empires.
So, my fellow anti-imperialists, let us engage in some fugitive planning so that we may flee from participation in past, present, and future imperial contests.
What forms of direct action might we engage in with others in order to destabilize and (re-)negotiate relations amongst nations otherwise than making, maintaining, and securing privileged national territories?
Which of these forms of direct action might enable further direct action?
Are these enabling forms of direct actions prohibited and punishable?
Are there any forms of defense by due process that might enable us to skirt prohibitions and ward off punishments while engaging in enabling forms of direct action?
Which of these forms of defense by due process might enable further defense by due process?
