Juanita Sundberg: Challenging “human exceptionalism" and institutions of change (ep427)

Written By kamea chayne
“To confront these very difficult times in which we are living, we need courage and bravery much more than hope.”
— Juanita Sundberg

In this conversation with Dr. Juanita Sundberg, we explore how our relationships with the more-than-human world are often shaped by our institutions and knowledge systems — which don’t always honor the diverse cosmologies and relationalities of life.

Juanita draws on her work with Indigenous communities and organizations as she highlights how our existence is determined not only by political and societal constructs of borders and boundaries, but by some of the most overlooked elements of the living world.

What is the significance of unraveling colonial modes of relating? What does it mean to nuance the concept of “human exceptionalism"? And how do we collectively re-enliven and heal such senses of dissociation?

Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app, and read on for our episode transcript.

 

About our guest:

Dr. Juanita Sundberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.

Her research brings the insights of feminist political ecology and the sensibilities of ethnography to bear on the politics of nature. And her work seeks to foster conversations between more-than-human geographies, critical Indigenous studies, and critical theories of race and ableism in relation to climate change and extinction in settler colonial societies in the Americas.

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transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

 

Juanita Sundberg: Yes, I mean I can speak to this about where I live and teach now, which is in British Columbia, Canada, but also where I continue to do work and have relationships, which is in Central America. So in both regions, the end of colonialism initiated what we usually term the ‘creation of nation-states’, but actually, the much more correct way to think about this is the creation of settler colonial states.

That term is important because it signifies that the descendants of the original colonizers are the ones who initiated the independence movements from the colonizers in the interest of creating a political system in which they were in charge.

So this happened throughout all of the Americas and that's the region I can speak the best about. So I'm going to limit myself to that. But in Canada, and the United States, these are the kinds of governance systems that we see. And it's amazing to me the extent to which these so-called ‘post-colonial posts’ have done so much to limit or to dispossess Indigenous people, for instance, in the Americas of their land, and to initiate large-scale, like more than we've ever seen before, extractive industries and the expansion of those extractive industries is what Indigenous and rural peoples peasant subsistence farmers throughout the Americas are facing right now.

And this hit home for me when I was invited to attend the Zapatista International, or actually, it was an encounter, an encuentro in Spanish, a gathering of Indigenous peoples in Sonora and Vicam, Sonora and Iaquí territory in 2007. I was invited to attend as an international observer and that meant that I could observe and learn but not intervene, not necessarily speak. So the reason that I bring up this encuentro is that I saw that community after community of Indigenous peoples went up to speak with the others holding the colonial documents that gave them the rights to their ancestral territories, rights collective land. This is not private property, but collective land rights.

Community after community held up those documents and spoke about the way that the national state, the nation-state, the contemporary state was creating legislation to dispossess them of that land or just allowing extractive industries to take place on those lands without any consultation, without any consent, with nothing. And that experience in 2007 brought home how we are not past an imperial political and economic structure.

Kamea Chayne: I wonder if this is related to how most nation-state institutions today around the globe play roles in actually perpetuating injustice, even within the borders of their countries of governance. And when I name some of these things or suggest some of these things, just based on stories I've learned from all over the globe and particularly centering Indigenous, local peoples, marginalized communities, I've had friends push back and be like, ‘that's such a negative view of countries.’ But for me, the political forms today have inherited their histories of colonialism and imperial relations. So I don't know if it's a stretch or overgeneralization to name these overarching connections, but I am curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Juanita Sundberg: It is not a stretch at all. And increasingly scholars are writing about what they call 'colonial capitalism’ or the ‘imperial mode of living’. This work aims to demonstrate empirically the extent to which economies in the global north and that term is so vague, but it does signify the formerly colonial countries with a few additions. And so the extent to which the global north relies upon and dispossesses the global south of natural resources, but also labor. So how do we rely upon what we call cheapened labor (it's not cheap labor because it's not essential to that person), right? It is a condition that has been forced upon that person, their labor has been cheapened. So what you're sensing and what you're hearing is being demonstrated empirically by an increasing number of scholars.

Recently, I used the Imperial mode of living as a framework in my teaching. I started using it because it helps bring together so many different elements that we oftentimes analyze separately. And it helps us bring them together.

Our life (say, me living here in Canada) depends upon the imperial extraction of other people's livelihoods, lifeways, natural environments, and more.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for these offerings. A project that you collaborated on looked at the militarized US-Mexico borderlands and how human and more-than-human worlds, ‘inflect, disrupt and obstruct the daily practices of boundary enforcement in important yet neglected ways’. I'm curious, what are some examples of how this happens? And what do you mean when you share that border policies have transformed the geographies of border traffic?

Juanita Sundberg: Yes, this is work that I'm very passionate about and I love talking about. So oftentimes, geographers, (I'm a geographer as well as a political ecologist), have studied borders, not so much in terms of the actual physicality of the border and how the creation of boundary enforcement measures policies reshapes the natural environment.

And the reason that I went to the US-Mexico border was not necessarily because it was a political boundary, rather I was interested in how natural protected areas on the US southern border were being reshaped or how conservation was being informed by border security measures. So kind of that nexus of conservation and security measures. So because I came to the border in that way, it opened my eyes to things that people who study borders hadn't focused on.

A lot of the analyses of borders before I started this research were about the way we talk about borders, how borders become part of us as people in our everyday lives, how we kind of continuously recreate the border through our language, and also the movement of people. But the movement of people wasn't being analyzed in terms of what people are moving through. Especially on the US-Mexico border. So that became my interest.

And you asked about how the natural environment ‘inflects’, and ‘confounds’. These are just fancy words for how the natural environment plays a part in shaping the policies of border security. So what does this mean? The reason that this became important to me is because, during my research, I was spending a lot of time in the Arizona borderlands in the United States and I was volunteering with a group called No More Deaths.

The goal of No More Deaths was to sort of walk migrant trails and to look for people in distress. And so I volunteered because a lot of the land that No More Deaths works on is national forest land or national monument land. So for me, it was an interesting intersection. And I also was very interested in working with No More Deaths because of their politics.

I began to see the extent to which the Sonoran Desert, which is where this was all taking place, is a significant player in how border enforcement and border crossing take place.

You can only imagine migrants trying to cross into the United States, walking through a desert in the heat of the summer. So it shapes how migrants, attempt to cross into the U.S. but it also shapes enforcement. It also shapes the border patrol because they too have to deal with that kind of desert landscape and desert conditions and they have to address it in all kinds of ways. For instance, I can just give one example, in the Sonoran Desert, in southwestern Arizona to be very specific, which is the site of many, many migrant crossings.

The land on the US southern border is nearly all in protected areas, but also the Tohono O 'Odham Nation. And so there aren't very many roads on any of those lands, because if it's a protected area, the roads are limited, not only historically, but also by federal law. This means that the Border Patrol needs to stick to the roads that have been created because the land around it is protected by federal law. Those roads, because of the presence of the Border Patrol, have become so compacted and eroded that Border Patrol agents very often will drive off-road if they are in pursuit, for instance, of a group of migrants. What this does then is destroy the social fabric of the desert soil.

As this is repeated on the desert soil, that social fabric is broken down. What happens in the Sonoran desert, doesn't happen in every place when soil is broken down, but in this particular instance, the soil turns into what they call moon dust. And basically, it means it’s a powder. And as soon as you try to drive through that powder, you get stuck. So border patrol agents driving through powder, in the middle of these protected areas that are quite immense are in danger of their own lives being put into danger, which limits their mission. So this engagement of the Border Patrol and the life of the soil is one of how I suggest that more-than-humans play an important role in boundary enforcement.

Kamea Chayne: Hmm. But the takeaway is more nuanced than just the more-than-human world has no boundaries, and borders are social constructs that don't exist biochemically, or physically in the more-than-human world, but it's crucial to look to how they interact and relate to and impact one another, right?

Juanita Sunberg: Yes. I say that boundary enforcement is a more-than-human affair, right? And in fact, everything we do is a more-than-human affair. It's just that Westernized humans think that we're the only ones who matter.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, everything is entangled and has implications on things beyond what people might more directly think about. Also, another way you've looked at how the other-than-human world disrupts particular human-imposed ways of living and conceptualizing the world is through the story of a plant known as Lacondonia schismatica and how they subvert disciplinary traditions in botany. And this can also feel a little abstract. So I'd be curious to hear you expand on the characteristics and capacities of this plant that challenge mainstream knowledge systems about the plant world, and also what this term plantiness is all about.

Juanita Sundberg: Okay, let's start with plantiness. It's a term developed by a geographer, Lesley Head, and colleagues to draw our attention to the properties and characteristics of plants and what those plants, what those characteristics can afford. In other words, what plants can do because of their specific characteristics or when they're engaging with something else, what are the possibilities? And then, of course, there are the things that we can't predict that happen in interactions.

So focusing on plantiness is a way of looking at the particularity of the plant and what those particularities mean when the plant interacts with other plants, animals, humans, and the world. And what kinds of things can happen in those interactions.

Lacandonia Shismatica is a tiny flower that was found in the Lacandon jungle located in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It was during a larger botanical project. Interestingly enough, the botanists or the scientists researching the ground employed a Guatemalan refugee from the Civil War in Guatemala who ended up staying in Chiapas.

And he was the one (according to the research that we did and all the people that we spoke to) who found this little flower. Miraculously, he found it because it is very tiny. It's not visible at all times of the year. When my research colleague traveled several times to the region, we were never able to see the Lacandonia schismatica. But the particularities of the plant are what matter to this story.

The Missouri Botanical Garden, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Institute of Biology at the Autonomous National University of Mexico were funding this project, it was called Flora Mesoamericana, so Mesoamerican flora. We're trying to expand our understanding of plants in so-called Mesoamerica, which is a term that is used to describe a region from central Mexico to Panama, which was the site of flourishing indigenous societies before the Spanish conquest.

So when this plant was taken from the community, which is also something that community members talk a lot about, lots of bits of the plant, as they describe it, were taken out of the community to be studied at the Autonomous National University of Mexico. When the plant was finally studied, they realized that one of its very distinctive features was that the sexual organs were different from other plants. So they're inversed and the stamen is positioned in the flower's center. And the reason that it's called schismatica is as you pointed out, it kind of caused a dramatic sort of schism in what is known about plants' reproductive organs.

So, the study of the plant re-initiated or played a part in a conversation about macroevolution. And it reignited that conversation and that is one of the ways that we try to think about vegetal politics, the ways that plants insert themselves or come to play a part in human lives and shape human society in significant ways beyond those that we learn in grade school or that the only reason that we can breathe is because of plants.

Rather, we wanted to understand the detailed ways in which plants, because of their specific plantiness, because of their specific characteristics, come to reshape people's lives. So in this case, people's careers were made because of the finding of Lacandonia schismatica. And again, it played this role in discussions about evolutionary biology.

Kamea Chayne: At the core of all of this feels like an invitation to challenge human exceptionalism altogether. And you share that the purpose of more-than-human methodologies is to produce knowledge that refuses to rely on a non-human binary, which “situates the human as superior and all-knowing”, end quote. And just to clarify and kind of pull through the essence a bit more here, I'm thinking about how all forms of human conceptions or humans attempting to conceptualize the world, even when we attempt to use our lenses, try to better understand the more than human world.

Ultimately, it's still human-centric just because that's where our vantage points begin and are also constrained. We can think and sense alternate forms of intelligence in the plant world and beyond and honor whatever we're able to learn. But our senses are our senses, and our lenses are incapable of fully capturing everything, say, about plant communication in totality because it's beyond our comprehension.

So I guess as part of the underlying message to shift our relationship to knowledge altogether and recognize that our knowledge systems and ways of knowing, first of all, that there is a multiplicity of them, but also that they are still limited representations of the much more complex and dynamic world.

So instead of using our knowledge to make certain impositions on the world, we need to humble our egos and remember that our language, our framings, our concepts, and categorizations aren't the real world itself, but only attempts to capture them.

Juanita Sundberg: To me, there are two parts to this conversation, and one of them is about our relationships with other-than-humans, and the other one is about knowledge. There are three parts to the conversation, and the third one to me is about who is this human who we're talking about when we say ‘human exceptionalism’.

When we use the term human exceptionalism, who are we talking about?

Okay, so when we say human exceptionalism, we're talking about a philosophical position that begins to solidify throughout the European colonial era and into the period that is called the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. So alongside colonialism and those kinds of expansions of what we call knowledge, there's a simultaneous solidification of the belief of human superiority, but not just any human, right?

It's Western, European, and then it becomes framed as ‘white humans’ and they are superior to other-than-humans. So this becomes solidified in our philosophy and our ways of life and so our ways of thinking. So that leads us to the second component which is the relationship part and then there's the knowledge part. So there's the human, who's the human, what human are we talking about?

Then there's the relationships, that out of this kind of philosophical positioning is the relationship that these kinds of societies develop with other-than-humans. And that relationship is always grounded in the hierarchy and the sense of superiority and the notion that other than humans are governed by instinct or don't suffer any pain, aren't self-conscious don't have individuality.

And then all of our knowledge systems are constituted about that belief system and that knowledge system. So those three components I think are important to consider when we talk about human exceptionalism.

Now, what I find interesting about the discipline of ethology is that, I guess you could say out of Western science, but the discipline of ethology is an attempt to understand how other-than-humans experience the world. But I agree with you, it's very difficult for us to know another person fully. It's difficult to understand how they work.

Nonetheless, the reason that I brought humans as a third component into this story is that other humans in other moments in time and even still to this day, other groups of humans have very different kinds of relationships with animals other than humans, right? And they don't need to know how an animal, for example, experiences the world to develop a relationship with that animal that is non-hierarchical. In other words, the relationship with other-than-humans doesn't depend on knowledge of those other-than-humans. It depends on the idea that those others are equal, right? They are equal beings in this world.

I think you're right that there are limitations to our capacities to know one another, but that in and of itself should not stop us from developing relationships with others. Does that make sense?

Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. Yeah, it's not like a utilitarian way of valuing an “other”, even if people don't understand these differences. It's just basic respect for all life and understanding all life at every level as sacred and also respecting that there is a lot that we don't know. And therefore, if we don't know something fully, that for me is more of a reason to respect them because by causing any sort of harm, you don't know the ripple effects of what that's going to do if you don't fully understand what you're destroying. So all of it still points to a need for greater humility.

Juanita Sundberg: And that I one hundred percent agree with.

Human exceptionalism is a position of arrogance. It's a way of looking at the world from a position of superiority. And it’s generated great wealth for colonial and settler colonial societies, but the consequences are extreme.

Kamea Chayne: The wealth feels like a very representational and homogenized form of wealth because it comes at the expense of the kind of homogenization of “living currencies”, like diverse living currencies that are being turned into this very monolithic and representational form. But I feel like all of this points to the limitations of working within existing systems and frameworks through their very particular logics and particular ways of rules and methods and ways of knowing and relating.

I want to bring up this question you raise, which is: “In this moment of ecological crisis, why do we think that the institutions and knowledge structures that cause these crises are going to save us? Shouldn't we be a bit suspicious about the fact that many of the institutions that once drove deforestation, as one example, are now driving conservation, restoration, reforestation, and climate change mitigation projects?"

You also share that “many forest restoration efforts, for instance, have failed to meet restoration goals, and indeed they worsened social precarities and ecological conditions.” I know this topic alone warrants an entire interview, but I would appreciate it if you could just share your thought process behind this invitation to be suspicious about the mainstream modes of conservation, restoration, climate mitigation, and so forth, and even things like mass tree planting projects and what this underlying message is for us.

Juanita Sundberg: Well, I think the reason to be suspicious is because these institutions are dedicated to, I'm trying to find the exact right word.

These institutions are invested in the continuation of the imperial mode of living. That's why we need to be suspicious of them — because they want to preserve, to the extent possible, the status quo.

So what is the status quo?

That is the imperial mode of living where me and the global North can have everything I want in an instant. And so that for me, is the primary concern. These institutions are embedded in, colonial capitalism or imperial capitalism. And some people prefer the term racial capitalism. Not only are they embedded, but they're committed and invested in its continuation.

So how are we going to rely on these institutions to resolve the problems that they have also created? Which doesn't mean that we as individuals are not involved. Of course we are, but we aren't the ones making these kinds of decisions and oftentimes behind closed doors, right?

I learned through my dissertation research, in which I was researching how organizations like Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy related to local people in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, which is in northern Guatemala.

I came to understand that conservation organizations and consultants would like other people to change their ways of being, but they are not interested in transforming our way of life, and by that I mean the imperial mode of living.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so it's very important to keep asking questions and remaining critical of all of these, I would say like establishment mainstream organizations that may feel aligned at the surface, but it's always important to dig deeper to see how they relate to a lot of the power dynamics and power structures of capitalism and colonialism. And things from the past as well.

Juanita Sundberg: Well, I just wanted to say that the very notion of a national park was created in the United States by dispossessing Indigenous people of their land, which they had cared for, right? And created these beautiful landscapes that Westerners came to look at and Westerners believed that they knew better and removed them from the land and those are our national parks in the United States and Canada.

Kamea Chayne: Right. And there's so much to this, the whole concept of wilderness as being “pristine and without humans”, this whole idea of natural resources, which I know you've critiqued as well. And I feel like a substantial portion of this conversation and a lot of our past podcast interviews have focused on kind of like perspective shifts, relational shifts, worldview and cultural shifts, and philosophical questions around a lot of topics.

And when I try to talk to some of my friends who aren't focused on these topics, they might say, ‘Okay, but what you're saying feels very abstract and philosophical. And I just want to know what this means in terms of what we do.’ And I feel like that's stuck with me because I got frustrated and kind of stumped at the moment. When I later reflected on that, I realized that my conceptions of what we should do might sound impractical or fringe to my friends if they've just kind of bypassed that need to interrogate how we see and relate to the world and our forms of knowledge.

I feel like our understanding of what we need to do and also even other things like our hobbies and interests and leisure time activities and ideas of fun and quality time also change when our deeper worldviews and relationships shift. So yeah, I feel like I was frustrated because I was thinking I'm not able to condense the deep unlearning and relearning and ongoing learning I've committed to since a decade ago into a neat digestible summary or a few simple action steps.

But I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on how we can better articulate these things in terms of the need to look beyond the systems and the matrix that a lot of us are deeply entrenched in and the need to critique our frameworks and worldviews and relationships which have been so wired into mainstream education and media and the entire logic of the system that they've kind of been rendered invisible as the norm for a lot of people for whom this is all that they know.

Juanita Sundberg: Yes, it is rendered invisible because it is the norm. And I agree with you, that it is very difficult because on the one hand, individuals like you and I do need to engage in processes of transformation, but we also need to be involved in collective processes of transformation, right? We aren't going to have societal change without collective movements, and without working as collectives.

In an individualistic society, we want to know what ‘I’ can do right now. And of course, there are things we can do right now as individuals. But that's not enough. We need to be involved in larger-scale collective movements.

And working through, I think, the relationship between the individual and the collective, because we do live in societies in which philosophically the individual is the principal actor, not the collective. And so, we are organized to think about everything as individuals.

So maybe I would use the word cosmology, which is a word that's often used in Spanish to talk about Indigenous communities and their cosmology, which means literally like your way of seeing the world, right, and engaging with the world. So if we think about it in terms of cosmology, the thing that I would start with, because we are in a Western society, is to think about the notion of the human.

What is our conceptualization of the human? And what does it mean to be a human? How do we assign value to human life and start thinking philosophically, right, or cosmologically that way? And if we start to dissect this notion of the human, we can come to understand that it's tied up with human exceptionalism. It's tied up with imperial modes of relating. And we can go from there, right? We can deepen our analysis. And I agree with you. And to me, this should be the work of teachers.

These cosmological questions are so important. What does it mean to be a human in this world?

The philosophical questions you talk about our crucial. And of course, you don't have to do that because by being in school, I didn't mean to suggest that you should only be doing that in school or you could only do that in school, but rather, that I agree with you that this is the work that we need to do. We need to examine our understanding of the world on this philosophical level.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And even with schools as well, there's institutional bias behind curriculum development and knowledge production in mainstream education. And the fields that get more funding and research and all that. So it all deeply systemic. It's also not people's fault for not even having been exposed to a lot of these ways of thinking because most things in the mainstream world are trying to gaslight us and tell us otherwise, but we kind of have to find the cracks and learn to see things from the outside in.

Juanita Sundberg: Yes, and you know what I think is important for us as individuals, we're told we need to recycle, or not use so much water, which I think is important.

It’s important to examine how we form relationships and how our relationships look and feel and begin to think about changing our relationships - to shift ourselves from thinking individually to collectively.

I've been inspired by my students, some of whom are committed to doing this work and to thinking, to think about their relationships, to think about what it means to have reciprocal relationships based on mutuality and care. And to me, this is a really important way of fighting the system. And it's such a small thing but if you start to pay attention to how you relate to others, and I don't just mean humans, this to me is extremely revealing. And then start doing the work to transform how we relate to others.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we'll have more references and resources from this conversation linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Juanita, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure and honor. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Juanita Sundberg: I know a lot of folks talk about the importance of keeping up hope and staying positive.

To confront these very difficult times in which we are living, we need courage and bravery much more than hope.

We need the courage to stand up for a world in which greed and destruction are not the primary drivers of society, to stand up and say, we want a better world.

As the Zapatistas say, a better world is possible. So we need the courage to stand up and demand those things of those around us. And that I look at the student mobilizations right now and I look at their bravery and that's what we need. Looking at, for instance, also Extinction Rebellion and the bravery of folks who stand up and say no more, that's what we need in these times is courage and bravery.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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