Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature: Negotiating the Environment

Initiatives to tackle environmental problems cross-nationally are often challenged by economic growth processes in postcolonial nations and further complicated by fights for land rights and self-determination of indigenous peoples. In order to survive, they try to counter the scramble for resources, often also clashing with environmental organizations that aim to bring their lands under their own control - e.g. to protect rare animal species. Consequently, disorderly and sometimes violent confrontations over our relations to nature take place in remote corners of the earth.

As contrary attitudes to nature form the background of these confrontations, an intercultural environmental philosophy that focuses on them, as well as on their epistemological claims, could do the groundwork to enable negotiations between the parties involved. Focus should be on the differing ideas on and relationships with nature - the modern, science-based ones, shamanistic or spirited ones and monotheist religious ones.

This book develops such an environmental philosophy, investigating how a globalizing philosophical discourse can fully include epistemological claims of spirit ontologies, while critically investigating the exclusive claim to knowledge of modern science and philosophy. In so doing it will draw from sources such as cultural anthropology, pluralist ontology, intercultural philosophy and postcolonial and critical theory.