No environmental conflicts without arts? The way to the CLAMOR project
by Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos
Why do we adopt certain environmental values? Why do people live (or not) the values they claim to endorse? Why do such values and behaviours change? Or, even worse, why are people stubbornly unwilling to change them? These questions keep motivating my work after twenty years as an environmental researcher. In this piece I explain why such a motivation has led me to study creative expressions used by environmental activists.
In the late 1990s I undertook economic analyses of maize cultivation in a protected area in Mexico . Both the scientific coordinators of that project and myself were surprised to know that planting maize had a negative cost-benefit ratio. Given the low yields, the time spent in the “milpa” (the traditional intercropped cornfield) could offer higher incomes when allocated in other activities inside or outside the community. Why on earth those populations kept planting maize?
“Else, what are we going to eat?”, clarified a smirking villager to the monodisciplinary researchers in need of a reality check.
The “uneconomical” persistence of milpa farming, and the display of cultural traditions attached to maize cultivation, made me reflect about the meagre local participation in regulation and planning of local land uses. Cultural expressions seemed to restate sense of place and contest the imposition of such decisions. Thus, local inhabitants’ life and work increased their visibility in the eyes of decision makers more worried about the fate of an iconic butterfly than about prevalent child malnutrition and ramping violence against community leaders in the area. In the following years, I would often see the term “usos y costumbres” (customs and traditions) as a source of enhanced local authority in controversies of over environmental management regarding water allocation, fire use, and forest management, in Mexico and in other Latin American countries. Yet planning decisions kept relying on either natural science analyses or on economic assessments.
A decade later, back in Europe. Find me building participatory scenarios for the management of aquatic ecosystems under pressure in the lower Ebro River, Spain. Early in the process, local stakeholders urged me to read the novel “Camí de Sirga” (the Towpath) , by Jesus Moncada), a masterpiece of the Catalan literature, in order to understand the land I was studying. The novel recounts the deliberate flooding of the author’s birthplace, a fluvial port town, and its relocation after the construction of several hydroelectric dams during the Francoist regime. That book indeed provided valuable insights about how local imaginaries of vanished places, still vivid in people’s minds. It also shed light on locals’ relationship with public authorities and with powerful users of the reservoirs, and on people’s visions of their own futures and the future of the river.
In the following years, environmental conflicts became my focus of analysis in topics linked to water management and mining . Data collection on environmental justice conflicts has increased in recent years, emphasizing not only their role in environmental defence but also in the promotion of sustainable transformations. Accordingly, a bottom-up restoration of distributive and procedural justice occurs sometimes as community members challenge power through resistance and bottom-up socio-environmental alternatives.
I could witness some of these resistances. In Mexico again, activists defending their village from the construction of a dam created community museums to rescue and re-value their own cultural artifacts. They expressed their claims in songs and circulate them in social media . All around the world, but specially in parts of the Niger Delta or the Amazon battered by oil spill incidents, people urge to keep fossil fuels under the ground chanting verses of Nnimmo Bassey’s poem, “I Will Not Dance To Your Beat”:
If you don’t leave crude oil in the soil
Coal in the hole and tar sands in the land
I will confront and denounce you.
Visual artists denounced the plunder of mineral resources and land grabbing in regions worldwide, with vibrant productions on the situation in Latin America, Africa , and some Asian countries. Hundreds of film productions help activist to make conflicts visible, denounce injustices, and mobilise affected communities.
A reflection on effects of trade and aid in Africa is part of the political satire of the British cartoonist Polyp. The magazine New Internationalist and the advocacy network Friends of the Earth have featured his creative work against injustice, and towards radical democracy and direct action.
Reproduced with permission.
With all this in mind I engaged in two different projects tending to understand the use of visual media in environmental conflicts. The first one, the multi-media Lab on Environmental conflicts (LAMCA) helped a group of young researchers at the ICTA-UAB to relise the potential of filmmaking as a source of enhanced knowledge about the conflicts. Some of the documentaries we produced reached wide audiences, so we also confirmed the power of visual media for disseminating research findings. Our documentary “We are here to stay!”, about the notion of environmental justice, is an example.
The second project, “Audiovisuals and Environmental Justice” (AJA), involved a collaboration with Colombian scholars to organise public events about films produced in environmental conflicts in Colombia. Dedicated events about films on coal mining, wetland management, artisanal fishing, and sugar cane plantations engaged researchers, film producers, and people involved in the conflicts in meaningful conversations about the conflicts themselves and about the use of films in their struggles.
All these accumulated experiences unveiled the lavish use of cultural expressions and artworks (e.g., paintings, music, and films) in environmental conflicts. Clearly, environmental conflicts go through various stages, from the latency to the post-conflict situation. Representation of identities and landscapes in artistic or cultural creation seemed to differ alongside, involving ends such as social cohesion, awareness, education, remembrance, healing or social innovation.
However, attempts to theorise mediatised environmental conflict or critical examinations of popular culture have not reached the environmental conflict literature, which has not systematically mapped and analysed these materials. Meanwhile, activists keep deploying artistic expressions, supported with information and communication technologies. See, for instance, the multimedia project “La Guajira le habla al país” (La Guajira talks to the country) compiling audiovisual media produced in the struggle against the impacts of coal mining in the Guajira department of Colombia.
Such a gap between motivated the CLAMOR project, which aims at advancing knowledge about the role of cultural artefacts (e.g., films, and other visual arts, music and songs, and associated digital media) in environmental conflicts. CLAMOR is an acronym for “Environmental conflicts through the lens of artwork and multimedia in waterscape transformations”. Guided by the question “How do cultural, artistic and digital media creations in water-related conflicts represent and support transformative or restorative initiatives?”, CLAMOR is conducting empirical research at different levels on the use of artistic creations and digital media in environmental justice conflicts.
To narrow down the action without disregarding societal significance, we focus on conflicts connected with waterscape production such as conflicts over wetlands and the coal commodity chain. Conflicts over mineral extraction or biomass extraction are often conflicts over water as water grabbing accompanies extractive projects. Collective claims for environmental justice usually denounce water depletion or degradation, waterscape alteration, and ensuing exposure to environmental and health risks. On this rich empirical foundation, we will build evidence-based theory on transformation and restoration in environmental conflict specially regarding issues of gender and diversity.
CLAMOR was granted with an individual Global Fellowship of the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions of the European Commission. The consortium involves the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and the University of California, Berkeley, and research collaborators in the United States and Colombia. We invite you to know more about the project, the team members, and the progress made in the different case studies in this website.