A diplomacy for human-nonhuman relations: letter to a young climate activist

Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar (2024) A diplomacy for human-nonhuman relations: letter to a young climate activist. In: Alvarez Nakagwa, A. and Douzinas, Costas (eds.) Non-Human Rights: Critical Perspectives. London, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 164-188. ISBN 9781802208511.

Abstract

'...Dear C, Taking as a point of departure the intervention of a young climate activist during an event sponsored by the New York Times in Scotland before COP 26, this piece is an attempt to present to a lay audience the human/non-human diplomacy invented and practised by a native peasant community in north-western South America. The context of such diplomacy pertains to their survival and survivance during the worst years of state and paramilitary violence in Colombia, driven by the search for profit, primitive accumulation, and largely tropical speculative ventures by multinational investors. This piece takes the form of an experimental essay or a letter, in the hope of finding alternatives to staid languages of pedantic law and forensic judgment that have condemned the language of human rights, its radical possibilities, to remain caged within a framework of stasis. It aims to explode such a framework. and their techno-solutionism, miming mimetic beings in wonderlands of what until yesterday was pure make-believe, you said: ‘Indigenous peoples,’ who are treated like children, ‘are custodians of most of the rainforests that are the lungs of our planet. Not only that, they also have the solutions for the climate crisis. And yet, they’re not sitting at the table’... This is a letter to a young European climate activist. Also a call to listen to and learn from the indigenous peoples of the Americas how to come up with a different law and diplomacy for human-nonhuman relations.

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