Micha Rahder: Rhinking through the ecology of knowledges (ep361)
“We are all pretty familiar with the concept of the ‘biosphere’, which is the ‘living layer’ of the earth. The ‘noosphere’ is the ‘thinking layer’ of the earth that grows in and from that biosphere. It includes human thought and activity but is also much more than that.”
In this episode, we welcome Dr. Micha Rahder, the author of An Ecology of Knowledges and an independent scholar, freelance editor, indexer, and writing coach living in North Carolina. Her research and writing address environmental themes ranging from forest conservation in northern Guatemala to extraterrestrial futures.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include recognizing love as a way of knowing, situating our awareness within the “noosphere”, using “paranoid knowledge” to better understand conservation science, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Episode references:
More on the Maya Biosphere Reserve
More on the philosophy of the Noosphere
Rahder recommends Pollution is Colonialism, a book by Max Liboiron
Rahder also recommends Cooling the Tropics, a book by Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into the resources and topics discussed. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Micha Rahder: The Biosphere Reserves are UNESCO's projects that are set down around the world. It's a model that mixes some strict conservation areas — usually in the form of national parks — with some mixed-use areas where local populations are. Communities can do sustainable extraction activities, and then there is a buffer zone.
The Maya Biosphere Reserve lives right in the northern part of Guatemala, right up against the border with Mexico and it covers about a sixth of the land of all of Guatemala. So, it's really quite massive, in comparison to this very small country. But it's also part of this northern region that historically has had a much lower population density than the highlands, which are farther south in the country.
Per the official designation, you've got some national parks, you have some forest concessions run by communities, and then a buffer zone with some sustainable agriculture programs — at least in theory. Not so much in practice.
But it was really laid down in 1990, which was at the tail end of the Guatemalan civil war. The civil war was a brutal and genocidal 36-year-long campaign primarily against Indigenous peoples. Much of the population from those highlands fled north into the lowlands and into the forests during the war. As they moved—and were encouraged to move often by the government that also opened up roads and frontier programs offering land to landless people—the forest was decimated very, very quickly. About half of the forest of this northern region was lost in under a couple of decades. So, in 1990, this Biosphere Reserve was stamped down on top of these dynamics to try to stop this deforestation and this migration frontier. But of course...
Drawing new lines on a map does not really solve all of the underlying social and political dynamics.
The reserve has really been beset by a whole lot of really intense social conflicts. There are some really successful community-managed forest concessions that have done a lot of work to protect forest cover, that have managed to find ways to provide income for community members, and that have allowed those villages to get more access to things like healthcare and clean water and education services. It's not perfect, but things are moving along.
Then there are other places, in particular in some of the national parks, where people were already settled in these national parks before the lines were drawn. And people continued to come and settle in the national parks after those lines were drawn, which are supposed to be free of people. So, the conflict around who can live there and what to do about all of these people who have been displaced, whether by the war or by poverty or some combination of these things in these parks is a real challenge for conservationists.
Making this more complicated more recently has been the growth of the region as a key corridor for drug and human trafficking by large narco-trafficking organizations, taking advantage of a lack of state presence in those Western national parks, and advantage of being able to hide their activities behind peasant activities, or behind cattle ranching. There is an increasingly really dangerous presence throughout the Maya Biosphere Reserve, and it's often difficult or impossible to know who is a poor displaced person, who is a poor displaced person who has been bought off by a drug trafficker, and who is a drug trafficker, and who's hiding.
There's just a lot of fear and suspicion and confusion and this whole mix of illegal and illegal activity throughout the reserve makes it incredibly difficult to untangle or to try to decide on conservation strategies.
Kamea Chayne: As will likely be a major theme of this conversation, there is a lot of complexity in this picture of the Maya Biosphere Reserve that you just offered as a glimpse into — there are certainly a lot of complicated dynamics and relationships at play.
To further this nuance, as examples of the trouble with conservation, you've shared, “There is a lot of critiques about the neoliberalism of NGO-driven conservation in particular, about these kinds of conservation models that prioritize economic logics, that shift responsibility from the state onto NGOs, and then also critiques about the militarization of conservation."
On the show, we've also explored the general concerns that many local and Indigenous communities have with big conservation, specifically its general approach that sees nature and society as separate. As you alluded to in the beginning, this approach to protect the “wild” while leading often to erasure or even violence against local communities, particularly with the Maya Biosphere Reserve. What are some of the concerns you've seen raised about the ways that conservation has been carried out? How have you or the local conservationists you've engaged with contended with the nuances of the relationship between militarism, criminality, and conservation?
Micha Rahder: For a long time, and for the first 15 or 20 years of the reserve, there were a lot of critiques, particularly about the neo-liberal aspects.
When the reserve was created, the Guatemalan government created basically their equivalent of the park service at the same time, and they were co-created together, but immediately subcontracted to these massive international NGOs to actually manage the reserve, to make plans, and do the work on the ground.
From the very start, the Maya Biosphere Reserve—[considering] that it's a UNESCO model—[has been] this international and very U.S.-dominated presence and conservation model, coming into Guatemala.
[They are] trying to import these market-based logics, these ideas that just that don't fit, that that reproduce or make worse inequalities. There were a lot of critiques about that.
More recently, in the face of the growing organized crime and drug trafficking, conservationists have been uneasily aligning with the Guatemalan military as a way of trying to protect themselves, trying to protect the parks against these really quite violent actors. Things like kidnappings and murders of conservationists, both institutional conservationists and people in some of these community concessions have been targeted for this violence.
A lot of conservationists have started turning to the military, despite the fact that the military, of course, carried out this genocidal campaign (in very recent memory). The continued impunity for those crimes really haunts this alliance. In terms of how conservationists grapple with that, I think it's so complicated because I've been saying “conservationists” as if this is a unified group so far, but it's really a whole mess of institutions. There are so many. Each institution has its own philosophy and practice, and then within that, there are all these different individuals, most of whom are Guatemalan, some of whom are Indigenous, some of whom are from the region, and some of whom are from other parts of the country. You sometimes have foreigners flying in and doing little projects and leaving. There are a few U.S.-based people who have stepped into prominent roles with some of these organizations. [There’s a] diverse field of people actually grappling with these problems, which, of course, shapes an incredibly diverse set of responses.
I would say that the people that I spent the most time with were really worried, and really uncomfortable with aligning with the military. Some people shared their own stories from the war or from the late years of the war or even after it, of being persecuted by the military or afraid for their lives or afraid for their family's lives. Now they find themselves aligning with this military that was responsible for that same violence. The feeling that most people shared with me was this feeling of being backed into a corner, of being like, “We don't know what to do. We're here. We're trying to find some way to keep this forest alive or as much of it present as possible. We're trying not to do harm to the people who live here, and we're also trying to not be killed, to not subject ourselves or the people we care about to violence, and not subject the landscape to violence.” Then they turn to the military, it seemed to me, out of desperation.
In my book, I am very critical of that, but I also try to unpack and uncover what has led people who really deeply dislike and distrust the military to align themselves with it.
There's such a broad, widespread fear and a sense that you can't trust anybody (even the people you know). That pervades a lot of the work in the Reserve.
It's very heartbreaking, honestly. I just do my best to sit with those contradictions and let my readers and listeners sit with those contradictions. What does it mean to try to make some positive change in the world when you feel backed into the corner? It's an incredibly difficult place to do work.
Kamea Chayne: Oftentimes, especially from the outside, it can be easy to portray things as simply good or bad or ethical and unethical and the like. But when you're inside of it, you're forced to sit with the nuances, with the varied layers, with the different dynamics, all the challenges, sometimes having to compromise this idea of “purity”, whatever that means. For those really wanting to get the full picture, it calls on us to seek to understand, [rather than be] making generalized judgments about what is going on.
A big part of your focus has been on what you name the “ecology of knowledges”. I think it's helpful to first introduce the concept of the noosphere, which has been a big inspiration of yours. It was certainly the first time that I had learned about it and it really resonated, so I would love to explore this with you.
What does it mean to think about “the thinking layer of the earth”, and how did it invite you to expand your perspectives on what knowledge even means, or who gets to define it?
Micha Rahder: I had never heard of this concept until I was working on the book and doing some reading and I came across it in some work by Lynn Margulis and it blew my mind.
We are all pretty familiar with the concept of the biosphere at this point, which is the living layer of the earth, and thinking about the earth as a living whole. The noosphere is the “thinking” layer of the earth that grows in and from that biosphere. So, it includes human thought and human activity, but is also much more than that. It also includes the rest of the living earth along with us, and it includes the non-living earth. Because the biosphere is itself intertwined with and growing in and from the mineral earth and the geological earth.
The concept is, very literally, the mind of the earth.
I was really excited about this idea because I have training in ecology, in cultural anthropology, and in what's called science and technology studies. To me, this idea of noosphere resonated across all of these ways of thinking and reading. It was this way of connecting human ways of thinking with more-than-human ways of thinking, and a way of recognizing the wisdom of the whole living earth and ourselves as a part of that.
Within that concept of the noosphere, I carved out this smaller concept of the nooscape because we can't access that global mind. To use an imperfect metaphor, a neuron does not have access to the thoughts of the whole brain. So as a smaller piece of this larger emergent whole, we can conceptualize that this might exist, but we don't really have access to what the earth is thinking per se. Or what the Earth's mind might even be like. But because of our peculiar qualities as a species, as a part of this living thinking whole, we have access to small pieces of what knowledge might look like and what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of practices are making up this larger whole.
The nooscape's "scape" [refers to] a landscape that is defined in relation to where you are situated, and the direction that you are looking. It's thinking about our smaller situated pieces of this larger whole.
This concept brought me to the ecology of knowledges (or really it was the other way around). It’s a way of thinking about how our practices of knowing are [embedded] with the rest of the living earth. This is not some Cartesian mind-body duality, where knowing happens abstractly in our human brains. But knowing is really an activity that we undertake with the world around us. That is as true for science and the ways that it arranges the world in very particular, careful, structured, and controlled ways in order to produce certain kinds of knowledge.
Another thing that I trace in the book is just embodied love of wild places, which is a way of knowing what it means to be a part of this larger nooscape or noosphere. Just by feeling yourself in a forest and being this embodied creature with all of these senses, paying attention to what's around you, and knowing that what is around you is also paying attention to you.
So, the ecology of knowledges is a way of bringing these multiple ways of knowing, including science, including this very paranoid [science]—trying to read where is the danger going to come from, who's who—and this love of wild places… bringing all of these different ways of knowing and being in the world together, in an ecological framework where all these things exist in relation to each other very materially, as well as conceptually, and are embedded in the living earth.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much you just said there that I really want to dive deeper into—the key part that stood out for me is the idea that the noosphere and the nooscape both decenter human supremacy and humans and morality. It really humbles the role of the human and recognizes us as being enmeshed within a more-than-human landscape and world.
To narrow in on the diverse knowledges for humans though, in the book you talk about three ways of knowing: techno-science, paranoia, and love — all of which you touched on already. To me, this is a really interesting dynamic, especially the relationship between techno-science and paranoia. Because when thinking about this idea of credibility, I think our dominant culture has a tendency to seek objective facts, objective data, and objective information. But that leads us to forget that in many cases, objectivity needs to be challenged and unraveled — if we really want to arrive as close to the truth as possible.
So, what do you mean when you talk about “paranoid knowledge”, as what has helped people to better understand scientific knowledge? What should this tell us about the idea of objectivity through things like official data and reports, and the like?
Micha Rahder: Yeah. Paranoia was so present throughout my fieldwork. I should clarify that when I use the word “paranoia”, I'm not talking about an individual pathology or a psychological something embedded in a single person's mind, but this broad affect and way of understanding and interacting with the world that people had and have, that grows from these histories of the war in which that directionality and cause of violence and who was aligned with whom was deliberately undermined by the strategies of the military. The war was fed on uncertainty about where violence might come from or who was responsible.
// TW: brief description of violent death in the following paragraph //
Similarly, narco-trafficker violence and organized criminal violence… the reserve thrives on this uncertainty, this back-and-forth movement between staying hidden and then these really spectacular, horrific moments of violence. There was one event while I was in the middle of my fieldwork, where 26 farmworkers were beheaded just outside the reserve and a message was written in their blood as a warning to the farm’s owner from a drug cartel.
It was just an incredible spectacularity of that violence, and the way that it was totally unpredictable… you never quite know who to trust. [It] led people to always have this double filter in every interaction with other people, and in every interaction with data and scientific knowledge about the reserve.
There would be these questions about who made this knowledge and what are they hiding and what are their connections and what can we put in our report safely and what can't we put in our report safely? I was able to see by being inside some of these conservation institutions that...
What pops out as the cleanest and most beautiful, objective data is data that has been very carefully crafted through this paranoid lens.
[It's data from being] able to navigate what is too dangerous to report in terms of what we've seen happening in the reserve that might result in violence against us in our institution or people in these communities. But what can we report that's just enough that we can take some conservation action based on what we're seeing?
So these institutions that were producing knowledge about the reserve, and primarily it was this one computer lab, the Center for Ecological Monitoring of the Reserve, that's part of the Park Service and also partly run by an NGO, they're so skilled at walking this fine line. I was able to very clearly see through this detailed fieldwork how embedded paranoia was in objective scientific knowledge and had the best knowledge about the reserve.
That lab’s reports were so widely used, they were so widely praised. Nobody praises the Guatemalan state or the data they produced, so for this to come towards the Guatemalan state institution was really exceptional. What they were really exceptional at doing was winding their way through this dangerous landscape, and reporting just enough to show that they were really attending to the complicated dynamics of the reserve, but just sidestepping what might be too dangerous to put down in a report.
I describe techno-science and paranoia as a symbiotic relationship, to go back to those ecological words. They really rely on each other here. They grow together and in the same way, they shape the way that reports are produced. People also read them through that same lens.
One example was a map of reported crimes in one of those Western national parks, and there just weren't very many crimes reported. If this were “objective data” or this view from nowhere, that is the imaginary of objective data, then that would mean that that park was actually doing pretty well. But the people viewing the report had this paranoid knowledge that was one of the places that was the most dangerous, where all the rumors were circulating about who, where, and what was happening. So they looked at that map and said, “Well, that either means that the people walking the patrols are being paid off and they're not reporting, or maybe they're not even walking their patrols.” Or maybe the paranoia was also a way of reading the objective data as well as producing it.
This idea that objectivity sits alone in the world as its own way of making knowledge is just not the case.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly seems like it really requires place-based knowledge of the relationships and dynamics and broader social context for people to best calibrate their lenses of paranoia and to be able to read between the lines. That's a lesson that we can all learn from, that oftentimes we have to dig deeper and peel back the curtains to better understand the “objective information” that we receive.
I also want to explore the other way of knowing a little more, which is love, because this isn't typically valued as something that could help us deepen and further our understanding and knowledge of the world, let alone is even seen as a form of knowledge itself. I wonder how you personally came to recognize love as a way of knowing worthy of specifying in the book.
Micha Rahder: That's a really wonderful question, in part because the book was built for my dissertation and the dissertation did not have love in it.
The first time I wrote it, I was so focused on the violence and the fear, that it was just about technoscience and paranoia. When I started revising it and going back and thinking about the work, [I realized] there was this piece of fieldwork that I had done that I couldn't figure out how to fit into my dissertation.
It was this part where I'd gone and followed wildlife veterinarians and biologists around for a month or two and they would go and tell these wild stories about danger. Those dynamics were certainly there, but it just didn't fit. When I was working on the book, I came to realize that it didn't fit because most of what they were talking about was actually just love, this incredible, transformative experience of being in the forest, of being present with wildlife, of being present with the trees and the plants and the rivers and the swamps and the lack of water.
When people would tell these incredible stories at these wildlife camps, yeah, there'd be these stories of the time I got kidnapped. Then it would be the story of the time I encountered a herd of wild peccary, which are wild little wild pigs, little wild boars, and these stories would be all mixed up together as part of this experience of the landscape and told with this joy. I honed in on this missing piece of, well, if everything is so scary and terrible and if the technoscience is just dry and evacuated of all of this emotion...
What is it that keeps people so engaged in this work in the region? That's where I came to this recognition of this embodied love.
I certainly felt it myself every time I would go out into the forest, even just out into villages surrounded by forest, it's so loud. We—and by we, I mean, Euro-Americans, and North Americans—tend to privilege vision and imagine tropical landscapes as very dense visual spaces. But really, it's the sound that I would find so overwhelming in these places. They're just such noisy, alive places. Everybody had stories about some personal transformation once they spent time in the forest. The transformation would usually involve a growing love for the place and a growing commitment to fight for it.
I certainly felt that myself. The more time I spent down there, the more I was also affected by stories of how much fire was there this year and the stories of the loss. I came to recognize love as an important part of what was keeping people involved in the work and much the way that I talked about technoscience and paranoia as being symbiotic and feeding off each other.
I think of the technoscience as parasitic on the love.
The translation of those embodied experiences in the field into these reports and animal accounts, such as “This is how many scarlet macaw chicks survived this year. Here's the graph about it.” It evacuates all the power out of that experience, but also relies on the power of that experience to exist.
So part of the argument I end up making—I try not to be prescriptive: a) I don't think there are easy solutions for this place, and b) it's definitely not my place as a white woman who's not from Guatemala to come down and tell people how to manage their landscape, that's not my goal or my place, but one of the few things that I more directly would like to offer to conservation in this place and elsewhere—is just to make space for that love and to recognize it and to build it.
Because I think that's the thing that's keeping the project going. It's just institutions don't know what to do with it. They don't know how to build from it. They only know how to push it out to the sides.
Part of the major problem with how strategies get decided is that love is not allowed a place in the room.
Kamea Chayne: In terms of moving away from being prescriptive, especially when we're trying to pinpoint and understand different issues or crises, I think a lot of us have the tendency to simplify and to reduce and generalize, because when we do, it can make the problems feel more comprehensible and therefore the solutions feel more straightforward and less daunting.
But you warn against totalizing narratives, whether it's seeing the state as one thing or seeing conservation as one thing or otherwise. What concerns do you have with totalizing narratives, and what led you to emphasize our need to really see the nuance and complex relations between different things at play?
Micha Rahder:
Totalizing narratives are an incredible source of violence in this world.
Whether it’s “the state is one thing”, or “nature is one thing”, or “people are one thing”. Whatever it is, it's always going to miss some nuance.
Cultural anthropology, especially environmental anthropology, which is the part I was trained in sometimes gets criticized for this, that we're not offering solutions. I think my work offers a different way of thinking as opposed to a solution, because I think the rush to solutions is part of the problem.
This idea that we need to—and again, the “we” here is a very particular way of stepping in and saving and acting now with this urgency to—intervene now. It's so present in climate narratives, but that sense of urgency can stop us from taking the time to reflect on what options do we have? What other opportunities do we have to slow down and build something different?
Yes, this problem is pressing, but if we're always acting out of this sense of urgency and fear, then we're always going to be missing part of the picture and ending up causing new problems.
Whether that's displacing violence from one group of people onto another or displacing violence from the landscape onto people, it's always going to just push the problem into some new form, as opposed to actually stopping and thinking about: what are the roots of the problem and how do we act if there is no one right answer? Where does that leave us? How do we build new political and environmental worlds that are not based on one right path?
That's the question that I sit with and that I encourage others to sit with—not to try to find the answer, but really take some time to think about, what does it mean to act without a single answer?
Kamea Chayne: You've shared that since publishing the book in 2020, you continue to practice “slow scholarship” and are enjoying pursuing ideas and curiosity outside of institutional frameworks. This would be applying that critical lens of looking at the production of knowledge, which we've been talking about, but towards the dominant educational and research institutions. I'd be curious to hear you elaborate on what limitations or influences you've seen coming from producing knowledge through institutional frameworks and with those particular publication pressures and timelines and what freeing yourself from those pressures may allow you and other independent and slow scholars to do.
Micha Rahder: I love talking about this because I was, in one sense, so incredibly fortunate to get a tenure-track job when I completed my Ph.D. They’re really hard to get. The job market is terrible. I felt incredibly fortunate, and I was incredibly fortunate to land that job but five years in, I similarly felt I was praying in a parasitic way on my love of what I did and was taking all the joy out of it for me and [there] was just this source of pressure to just produce as quickly as possible in order to meet these institutional frameworks.
I left that job, and it's been almost three years now. I started supporting myself as an editor and writing coach, primarily for other academics and just working and thinking at my own pace because I know that I will never stop working and thinking and writing and reading and being a part of this living earth and its mind in ways I'm so deeply committed to knowledge and its potential to change the world… I will never stop doing that. But it has slowed down in part because I don't have institutional support. That's the flip side.
The idea of slow scholarship came about as a proposal for feminist methods to resist these temporal pressures to always speed up in the institutions of academia.
It was also really criticized because, of course, the only people who really have the power to slow down and retain their jobs in academia are really the most senior scholars who have tenure, and who have a lot of job security. All the junior scholars still have to produce in order to keep their jobs or to find a job. As an independent scholar, I have the freedom to do slow scholarship, and I'm also forced into slow scholarship because I just can't afford to dedicate all of my time to it.
I was not that happy about it when I left, but a few years [later] and I find it so rewarding. My reading practices are so much less extractive, which is delightful. I just get to read. I just get to follow my curiosity instead of always prioritizing what's going to help me get another line on my CV. It's been really freeing and wonderful, but of course [it] comes with the lack of institutional support. I don't have grant funding. They don't have research funds. They don't have these other things that enable that work and so on. The other on the other hand, I am forcibly slowed down as I make my way into making knowledge in a different way.
Kamea Chayne: Finally, in terms of some guidance for our path forward, you've shared: “Instead of working ourselves through strange loops of being both part and whole, of thinking globally and acting locally, I suggest instead that we think and act nooscapically—attending to the nonhierarchical relation between scales (including the global and the local) as they emerge from multiple situated encounters and relations."
To offer our listeners something to linger on after this episode, I'd appreciate it if you could expand on what it means to blur these boundaries and binaries of parts and wholes or local and global, and how that might influence how we think about our roles and creating a more just and healthier future.
Micha Rahder: I think this idea that the global and the local are these bounded different things that don't that aren't connected or are connected in this very particular way, where you've got all these little local bubbles and then they add up to the global… That's just not the right picture that we should be thinking and acting with.
My backyard is the global.
The global does show up on people's plates at dinner, and trying to separate out where we should act or even try to understand our actions according to these preset scales just doesn't make sense. It's certainly not a hierarchical relationship. It's not “I'm all for local politics.” I love people digging in where they live. I'm all about it. But I don't see that as only affecting my local place. I see those actions as part of a connection and a way of building something that we might not have access to. Again, thinking with the noosphere.
We might not know all of the ramifications of what we're doing, all of the echoes that will be shared across time and space, and I think just living with the uncertainty of scale is actually a really beautiful thing to just open yourself up as a part of a much wider world, that is not constrained by these little isolated bubbles, but that we're all partly connected in some way. What we do will have effects that we cannot predict and cannot know.
I find that as hopeful as it is scary and I like to lean into that hope.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Micha Rahder: Two books. One is Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism. The other is a book that isn't actually out yet. I had the privilege of working on it for Ideas on Fire, which is an editing company. I'm going to say her name, it is Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Cooling the Tropics. It will be coming out this fall, and it’s a beautiful book.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Micha Rahder: I just go out into my backyard after work every day and spend some time just looking at the bugs and the weeds and listening to the birds.
Kamea Chayne: What is your biggest source of inspiration right now?
Micha Rahder: Looking to other generations, both the generations that have come before me and the generations that are coming after me to get inspired by all the different ways that we can learn and change across time.
Kamea Chayne: Micha, I really feel shifted in an embodied way after this conversation, and so I'm so grateful for your time and the wealth of knowledge that you shared with us here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Micha Rahder: Stay curious and just always be open to where your curiosity will lead you to grow.
