Christine Winter: Rethinking the philosophies underlying settler politics (ep370)

Written By kamea chayne
“To try and resolve the environmental problems that we’re facing from within the same ontological and epistemological frameworks that have created the problem just can’t work. The Western world needs to be rethinking the way it approaches what it is to be a human being on this planet, and what relationships are important.”
— DR. CHRISTINE WINTER

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Christine Winter, (Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Ngati Pākeha) who is a senior lecturer in environmental, climate change, multispecies and indigenous politics. Her research focuses on the ways in which academic political theory, and particularly theories of justice, continue to perpetuate injustice for some people (and more specifically for Māori) and the environment. Her most recent research centers on ensuring the emerging field of a political theory of multispecies justice should have decolonial (and anticolonial) foundations.

Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include questioning the philosophies that underlie settler politics, reorienting towards multispecies and intergenerational justice to become good ancestors, moving beyond rights-based frameworks for protecting the more-than-human world, and more.

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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 clarity.

Christine Winter: What became very obvious to me as I was looking at intergenerational justice and intergenerational environmental justice was this disconnect between philosophers or political theorists clearly wanting to come up with a strategy or come up with a set of rules or come up with an ethical framework, a political framework to guide policymakers, to guide politicians, to guide our communities, and not being able to, because the underlying ontology of the philosophy left them nowhere to go.

That made me think, well, what is this? What are the things? And there are a bunch of them. One of them is materialism. One of them is dividing space into property. Whether it's land or waters or air or whatever, I'm turning the material world into property, turning place, as I phrase it, into measured spaces with which one has no emotional or spiritual, or cultural connection. There's individualism, which is probably one of the greatest culprits, combined with Anthropocentrism, combined with this dualism, the idea that human and the non-human realm are separate, and then this issue of time and the idea that time is progressive, that the past exists, but it's past, and the present is all-important, and we can discount the future. That we can discount the future because we're going to be advancing and people in the future will be able to pay their way out of or invent their way out of whatever problems we leave behind.

Those frameworks are very, very different from the way that, for instance, Maori philosophy is framed, in that we have concepts such as you being related to a place. So land, waters, and seas are not tradeable—they are relational. Individualism isn't the focus, it's the collective and [it’s] the good of the collective that's important. In pre-colonial times, they were less materialistic societies and more interested in self-sufficiency, in improving the world for future generations, rather than taking from it now and hoping that future generations will be able to invent their way out of problems. [And with respect to dualism,] the non-human and the human drama are understood to be intertwined. There isn't a clear separation between the two. Finally, [there’s an] idea of time where the past and the present and future are conceived of existing simultaneously.

One of your key concerns is whether or not you're going to be a good ancestor, whether you are going to, in fact, have facilitated the good life for future generations.

I feel quite strongly now that to try and resolve the sorts of environmental problems that we're facing from within the same ontological and epistemological frameworks that have created the problem just can't work. The Western world needs to be rethinking the way it approaches what it is to be a human being on this planet and what relationships are important and how it is that the world must engage with the non-human realm to protect both the non-human and human and to live a good life in both an ethical and a physical way.

Kamea Chayne: Well this is a big question, and we could certainly spend hours just talking about each of the themes that you touched on here and the few things that you mentioned—private property, materialism, individualism, and so forth. So often, a lot of people accept them as just how things work, and so much of it is embedded within settler politics. For a lot of people, it's all that they ever know. So I think naming these things is important because it helps us to go from accepting them as just how things work, to recognizing that there are other ways of being and relating to the world.

In addition to inter-generational justice, part of your research focus, and central to the Maori philosophy, is also this idea of multispecies justice. I wonder if you could elaborate more on what this means in your philosophy and culture and how it blurs our conceptions of boundaries, borders, and individual selfhood that may be the underlying worldview of Western politics and law.

Christine Winter: Very briefly, it's a matter of understanding that there is no separation between human and non-human, that human beings are part of the non-human realm and dependent on it, and that we are all related. Now, the way that Maori philosophy explains that is to identify that all things on earth have a spiritual quality, a spark of life, as it were.

All things, in their own ways, are reaching out to connect with everything else around them.

One of our roles as humans, as the youngest relatives, being the last to come into existence, is to ensure that we respect the Maori, that we respect the mana, the respect-worthiness of everything, and that you think very carefully about how you engage with the non-human realm.

One example would be if you take what would seem to be an inanimate thing, if you look at a mountain or a hillside, you understand that its purpose is to be a mountain or it is to be a hillside. What's important then is any use you make of that, any paths you may establish on it, any building you may place on that hill, that mountain should enhance the being of the hill or the mountain rather than detract from it. So that would make you then think twice about cutting a steep road up that hill or mountain when fully in the knowledge that it's very likely that will cause slips, that it will scar the mountain or the hillside, that will make it less visually pleasant, but also that it will stop it in some way from being itself, having its own purpose, and respecting that purpose and treating it with the esteem that we believe it deserves.

Kamea Chayne: To take this another step further, another part of the worldview embedded within dominant Western thought is the separation of nature and culture as different things. The need to problematize this dichotomy is now pretty familiar to me because I've been thinking through it with various Indigenous and decolonial scholars and leaders, but I was reminded of how deeply rooted this binary is in Western thought when I briefly touched on this idea while speaking with an environmental journalist who had to stop me, and ask what I meant by that.

So to someone who has never thought through what it means to blur this boundary and see nature as culture and vice versa, how would you explain this philosophy to them and why might this deeper worldview shift be foundational to our abilities to heal our planet and create politics rooted in multispecies and intergenerational justice?

Christine Winter: What I'm going to do is I'm going to flick into Western science. I'm going to flick into forensic science. Should you be unfortunate enough to die prematurely, one way that a forensic scientist can sort out who you are is to look at and examine and perform chemical tests on your bone and your bones will tell them with some accuracy where you were born and raised because of the chemical composition in your bones.

Now, your bones have that chemical composition because you would have eaten food from that place. The science is becoming less accurate as we become more mobile and as our food comes from places other than our own gardens or our own immediate environs. But it does indicate that we are only human because we are able to take food from the environment and because we breathe air, air that has been processed through trees and that moves around the earth. The boundaries between me and air, for instance, and you and air are very, very blurred.

At what moment is that something external? Then, at what moment is it internal? At what moment is it inanimate and at what moment does it animate you and me? If we think about those things, we begin to realize that there is no "human" or "out there." We are in the world. We are of the world. We are of the environment, and we cannot exist outside of the environment.

To present ourselves as something other, something separate from, is the most extraordinary hubris.

Kamea Chayne: On that note, I've been actually curious to reframe this common saying of life on Earth or humans on Earth to life as Earth or humans as Earth, because it shifts the perspective from seeing humans as being separate from Earth to seeing us as a part of the greater whole. I feel like there are a lot of things embedded in language as well that are reflective of these deeper worldviews. They're often accepted as the ways that we should relate to the world, that we could really think about and pick apart.

Christine Winter: Yeah, I really like that. One of the obvious problems with language is how we refer to that which is not human and we tend to do it as an opposition—so human and non-human. It's very, very difficult—within English anyway—to find a way of expressing that which is not human without including the word human in some way.

Kamea Chayne: That's so true as well.

You mentioned time earlier, which I want to circle back to as we think about the relationship that different corporations and political institutions have with time, whether it's short or long-term goals or terms of service in office.

I wonder how these structures and institutions that have been set up have become a barrier to intergenerational justice and decision-making. It's hard to even imagine what politics and governance could look like without these arbitrary time limits or this orientation towards immediate and short-term gains. But I also wonder how you might envision political frameworks that have a different relationship with time that can guide us towards intergenerational thinking and justice.

Christine Winter: There are examples of corporations that have 100-year and 200-year plans. One of those is SoftBank in Japan. If [you’re interested] in making a 200-year plan, you are not actually able to foresee exactly what the shape and the form of the business are going to be in 200 years’ time. But you're also very clear that you want that business to exist for that length of time. And if you want that business to exist for that length of time, then you're going to want to ensure that the environment, in the very, very large sense of environment—the environment in terms of society, economics, government, and physical environment—remains conducive to your business thriving.

The nature of the decisions that you make will be very, very different in the decision-making process, in the boardroom, and in the executive suite, if you are asking the question, “If we do this, how will that jeopardize the chances of this business still existing in 200 years’ time? How will that enhance our future?” Here in Aotearoa, I know of one iwi which has a thousand-year plan. So, it's making decisions now with the intention of ensuring that in a thousand years that they remain strong, that they have ensured that their land, that their rivers remain healthy and vibrant and reproductive. There are other large iwi corporations who own forests, and they too have 200-year plans and longer.

If you move away from quarterly objectives or annual reports and if governments have a have some requirement to think beyond their own term, and I'm not quite sure how we structure that—but I [do] think a government should be responsible for thinking 10, 20, and 100 years into the future—then the decisions to [be made] are quite different to the ones that are just short-term and they [would] involve caring for the environment, caring for the way society is directed, and caring for people far more than [within] the current system.

Kamea Chayne: I wouldn't doubt that the ways that the dominant Western culture conceptualizes the self in a very atomistic and individualistic way also relates to and contributes to perpetuating short-term thinking because people want to build whatever it is that they want to work towards right now for themselves. So if people were to conceptualize selfhood in a much more expansive way, intergenerationally, and in a multi-species ecological and community way, I think that would also shift the ways that we relate to time and the goals that we work towards.

Christine Winter: It comes back again to this business of ancestorship. So, are you respecting what your ancestors have done before you? How will future generations regard you as an ancestor?

If you see yourself as part of a community that expands through all time, that leads to a quite different engagement both with the natural realm and with other people, with society in general.

The atomistic, individualistic, capitalist, utility-maximizing person, that we're led to believe is what people are, I think is a very narrow view of human potential. It's a very poor description of who or what we can be. It leads to a shriveled-up form of human being, I think.

One of the things that struck me at the beginning of COVID, I was reading an article by a journalist who was raging against the lockdowns in Australia, saying that he was sure that his father, who was [in his] early seventies, would be willing to die so that he could have his freedoms. After all, he's taken all he needs from this world. That struck me as being a very odd way of looking at being human. It seems to me that the measure of our life is how much we have given, not how much we've taken.

Kamea Chayne: Your research focuses on the ways in which justice theory in the settler-states, broadly and specifically for Maori Aotearoa New Zealand, perpetuate practices that are unjust: domination, oppression, and violence. This can feel a little abstract.

So, I wonder if you could provide some examples as to how the idea or visions of justice within settler-states, with their underlying philosophies and worldviews, still might perpetuate injustice. Also, whether this is an invitation for people to think beyond rights-based frameworks of justice and equality within our current political systems.

Christine Winter: This really leads us back to the differences between Western ontology and Maori ontology. Justice is thought of as within a human rights framework—it’s entirely anthropocentric. But when you live in a culture that is equally as concerned with the non-human realm, then that framework for justice is not going to work.

When you have a theory of justice that is focused entirely on the individual human, then that does not work for people who are collective, for whom the understanding of the good life stems from the strength of the community, that the individual can only be strong if the community is strong, that in fact, the individual can only be autonomous in an environment where the community is strong.

These ideas of time, also the Western conception of time, that completely dismisses any alternative conceptions of time, and the whole property regime where you've got a legal system that understands land and waters and even air (if we think about emissions trading schemes, which are privatizing the atmosphere); If you contrast these with peoples for whom, one, it is inconceivable that those things can be owned, but then secondly, there are very deep relationships with places—for them, to parcel it up and sell it, remove those lands from the commons, to not have a legal structure within your society that allows for a relational understanding of people and land, it is, I think, perpetuating an injustice. It's a mode of domination. A mode of ongoing colonial violence, actually.

Kamea Chayne: It seems like inclusivity politics just doesn't go nearly far and deep enough to realize the transformations that we need for collective healing.

A few years ago, I remember it was all over the news when the Whanganui River, after over a hundred years of activism from the Maori people, became recognized as having human rights. So given what we just discussed on the rights-based framework, how have you thought through this type of historic recognition within settler politics, and what might you still see as the limitations of just replicating this model of land protection everywhere and expanding who is recognized as having human rights?

Christine Winter: I think it's very exciting. It is an example of a process in which a capitalist framework of creating a legal identity or a legal person has been repurposed to recognize an iwi, or the people of the Whanganui’s relationship with the river. It really is full of potential within this country. It is part of a reparations process for the government's contravention of the founding treaty of the nation.

I'm not sure how it can work in other countries. We've seen in the United States there was an attempt to grant Lake Erie personhood status by a local municipality and that was then overturned by the state government. The same thing happened in India. One of the states gave legal personhood to rivers, the air, and glaciers in an attempt to protect them from pollution. But again, the state government overturned that legislation. The situation in New Zealand was completely unique because it was this confluence of treaty reparations and then the goodwill to find a way to work with two quite different ontologies and epistemologies, two quite different legal systems, and come up with a solution that would work for both peoples.

The first case actually in Aotearoa was for Te Urewera, which is a large mountainous area. It had been a national park and it gained personhood in 2014. Whanganui followed and next will be Taranaki Maunga. Now each of these areas is already what would be called, in Western parlance, a wilderness. How something could work similarly for, say, an area that was intensively farmed—I don't know that there would be the will or the ability to do that.

However, it is a very significant move, and it is the first move towards forming a legal precedent that recognizes the two different legal systems, two different cultural, philosophical, and knowledge systems in one state. Whether that can be effectively repurposed in other places around the world will depend entirely on the cultural backgrounds of the people who are doing the work and the political systems in which they are working.

Kamea Chayne: Every place certainly has unique challenges and histories to contend with. What I've come to learn is that for many Indigenous communities, everything is tethered to the land, and to place. Ecology, culture, spirituality, economy, cosmologies, knowledge, and kinship systems are all intricately connected and parts of the same whole that shape one's existence. It makes sense to me because while there's so much diversity there, it is all place-based, and as a part of the complexity that has developed over hundreds or thousands of years or longer to help communities to live and thrive as a part of their unique cultural landscapes.

The subtle thread I want to pull through is that to me, that's where the diversity for resilience comes from. I see that diversity as necessarily being context and place-dependent. Though I think it's really challenging now that many places have been through historic processes of colonization or imperialism that have uprooted a lot of people, severed many from their place-based cultures and histories, homogenized diverse cultures, and led to a cultural hegemony so that the forms of diversity that exist are no longer as grounded and rooted in the same ways.

Again, it's challenging now, especially in an age where people really value the ability to think and feel and believe freely as individuals, to then say maybe the ways that particular groups of people think and their ways of seeing and relating to the world are unhealthy and life-compromising. For example, people cannot just take Indigenous practices of land care without also considering the deeper philosophies of life that those diverse practices emerge from.

So there are a lot of layers here, but I'd be curious to hear your views on how we can both honor the knowing that diversity lends itself to resilience, including diversity in thought, and have this delicate conversation about how some philosophies and worldviews may actually be key drivers of our collective ailment.

Christine Winter: In this current moment we’re seeing unnatural disasters unfold across the world: like the fourth flood event in New South Wales, Australia in the last 18 months. You take the fires and the redwood trees, the sequoia trees in California. You have places in Europe on fire, you have fires in Serbia. We've got the Antarctic ice sheets melting. These are not natural hazards. They're not natural events. We refer to them as natural hazards or natural catastrophes, but they are unnatural.

People need to stop and think, “Okay, so why has this occurred? What is it that has led to this?” We know the chemistry, we know the physics. We understand all of that. But it's time really to reexamine, for the West, particularly the hegemonic cultures, to reexamine the foundations of their culture, the foundations of their politics, the foundations even of science and knowledge. That doesn't mean you can just pick and choose bits and pieces from other cultures, because that's not going to work. That's not something of your own.

But it is very important that the West reexamines these foundations, because as I've said earlier in the conversation, I am absolutely convinced that it is impossible to resolve the environmental crisis from the same worldview as has created them. One example of that is that we turned to legal mechanisms to monitor or create frameworks around what can and cannot be done. But all of those have wriggle room, all of those allow for certain industrial practices, allow for pollution and extraction up to a certain level.

None of [our existing legal mechanisms] actually challenge the worldview that says any of [the industrial practices] are okay.

It just says, yes, it's okay, and we've got to limit how much you do. I'm not quite sure if that answers your question or not, but I do think it's not a question of saying, “All these other cultures seem to have got this solved,” or, “I like what these people do over there, so we'll just take a little bit of that.” It needs to be a cultural shift within a given culture, and that culture is really, as you described it, the hegemonic Western culture.

Kamea Chayne: There's certainly no simple and straightforward answer or a clear path forward. But I do really appreciate thinking through these big questions with you.

Something that I know you've been sitting with is what the value of multi-species flourishing would mean for how you relate to and care for native species, introduce species and even invasive species, who in most cases are present where they are through no fault of their own. So, as we're closing off our main discussion here, what are some of those nuances and questions you've been curious to lean deeper into? What words of guidance do you have for our listeners here?

Christine Winter: The idea of multispecies justice as a political theory is an opportunity to start really challenging these underlying ontological foundations of political theory. As academics, as we start thinking about what a political theory of multi-species justice would look like within the Western framework of justice, I think then we also have an opportunity to reassess the way we engage with people as well. It requires a quite significant shift in the way that Western philosophy is conceptualized to include the non-human realm.

Up until now, justice was just a matter of the interactions between human beings. If you bring the non-human realm into the spheres of justice, it makes theorists reconsider what is important and how justice is conceived.

By bringing the non-human realm, it does two things. It makes us more aware of our dependence on a healthy environment. And it requires a deeper form of compassion or empathy. My hope would be that that would then extend to other people as well as to the non-human realm.

What it may also do is begin to eradicate the language of others—people who are not from your area or who look different or who are differently abled or whatever, or other creatures—and [instead] seeing us all as part of a united whole where everything needs to be considered and treated well. My hope is that the result of that is that there will be greater justice between people, as well as justice between people and the non-human realm.

The issue of invasive pests is a really, really difficult one. It's one that I have honestly not resolved for myself as a Maori person. One of my responsibilities is to care for my environment, to care for the native species in my country. Invasive species are just destroying those native species. However, as you so rightly point out, those animals are there not because they have asked to be brought here, not because they came here on their own. But they were brought here by the colonies. They are a function of colonial action. They are, in fact, as much of a victim of colonization as Indigenous peoples around the world. How it's dealt with, I honestly have no resolution. I feel really torn about it. That's my honest response.

[Musical offering: Eye of the storm by Ali Dineen.]

Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Christine Winter: There are a number of things that have impacted me, but two books come to mind immediately. One is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which is just an absolutely beautiful book and I would advise everybody on Earth to read it. Secondly, I read and listen to the Emergence Magazine and the Emergence Magazine Podcast, which give me a daily or weekly dose of insights into how to be a thoughtful, engaged, and ethical human being in a multi-species world.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Christine Winter: I walk a lot and I look constantly for beauty. I see beauty in the clouds and in the flowers and the trees. There is a tūī, a native New Zealand bird that calls outside my office window all day, every day. As I walk through cold, sleet, rain, and wind, just yesterday, it was still in its tree and it was still singing as gaily and as happily as it does every other day of the year. I was actually incredibly inspired by its resilience.

Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration right now?

Christine Winter: Family and young people. I am just so impressed with the students that I engage with in class and around the universities, and as I watch them leading on climate change. They inspire me daily.

Kamea Chayne: Christine, it's been an incredible honor to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for this deeply enriching and nourishing discussion. For now, as we wrap up all the wisdom you've already shared with us and the deeper inquiries that you've inspired us to think about, what parting words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as green dreamers?

Christine Winter: Just keep on engaging, keep thinking, and keep thinking deeply. Try to navigate new routes, not just accept the status quo, and know that change is possible.

 
kamea chayne

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

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