Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Boxes
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Beyond Modern Environmentalism
- 2 Suburb, Field, Laboratory: Recomposing Geographies of Early Environmentalism
- First Interlude: Green and White Dreams
- 3 Revolt Against One-Worldism: Radical Claims on Land and Work Post-1968
- Second Interlude: Planetary Icons
- 4 The Right to Subsist: Transnational Commons Against the Enclosure of Environments and Environmentalism
- Third Interlude: Witnessing in the Global Resonance Machine
- 5 Earth Politics: Disagreement and Emergent Indigeneity in the So-Called Anthropocene
- Fourth Interlude: Making Things Resonate
- 6 Conclusion: Resonance Beyond Environmentalism
- Coda: Afterlives
- Notes
- References
- Index
Third Interlude: Witnessing in the Global Resonance Machine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Boxes
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Beyond Modern Environmentalism
- 2 Suburb, Field, Laboratory: Recomposing Geographies of Early Environmentalism
- First Interlude: Green and White Dreams
- 3 Revolt Against One-Worldism: Radical Claims on Land and Work Post-1968
- Second Interlude: Planetary Icons
- 4 The Right to Subsist: Transnational Commons Against the Enclosure of Environments and Environmentalism
- Third Interlude: Witnessing in the Global Resonance Machine
- 5 Earth Politics: Disagreement and Emergent Indigeneity in the So-Called Anthropocene
- Fourth Interlude: Making Things Resonate
- 6 Conclusion: Resonance Beyond Environmentalism
- Coda: Afterlives
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Witnessing: communicating the truth of a lived reality, of a shared reality, in order to demand action. Speaking what can barely be spoken, because recognition is withheld. Seeking words, images, symbols and sounds that can hold together an experience that is being pulled apart, that requires new names.
Rosa did not hide her anger as she got up to speak, raising a jar of soil above her head. As she spoke her words, she sprinkled the soil on the ground in front of her.
“I speak in the name of all Guatemalans who are suffering hunger right now”, she declared [translation Naomi’s].
More soil fell to the ground.
“I speak in the name of those who are sick and do not have medicines. I speak in the name of families who don't have appropriate housing. I speak in the name of those who can't read and write. I speak in the name of the unemployed. I speak in the name of children, young people, adults, and old people. I speak in the name of the exploited. I speak in the name of the Madre Tierra, whom they exploit. … In the past they obliged our grandmothers and grandfathers to pay tribute. They divided up our pueblo [village]. They stripped and killed our grandparents. And they sent us away to live in the mountains. This government does not represent us – its laws are an expression of the dominant class, protected by armed forces. We call for the creation of a Pluri-National state and the making of a National Assembly that represents our constitutive peoples. We call for a national strike. … The Madre Tierra is the witness to our disfigurement, grandmother too wild to be tamed, and source of our future liberation. And so we will fight.” (Fieldnotes, San Luis, Guatemala, June 2018)
This was a public meeting in San Luis, a municipality in the southeast of the Petén region of Guatemala. Rosa was speaking for the regional office of the Comité de Desarrollo Campesino (Campesino Committee of Development; CODECA), a human rights and environmental rights organisation founded in 1992 to defend and promote the rights of Indigenous and rural workers.
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- Information
- All We Want Is the EarthLand, Labour and Movements beyond Environmentalism, pp. 102 - 104Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023