A Conflict between High-Modernist Ideology and Territory Rootedness

What is it about?

Humanity’s responses to the different ecological crises that it faces are invariably restricted by the wider epistemological framework that characterizes the globalized nature of Westernized society. In many cases, this hegemonic and increasingly homogenous mentality, which centers on technocentric solutions implemented by State planners and other “high modernist” actors, purposely silences other possible approaches to the environmental issues at hand, and specifically the indigenous, land-based communities and their responses to the environmental issues they face in their ancestral territories. In the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala, the ongoing contamination of Lake Atitlán and the subsequent State-sponsored proposal of a massive wastewater management plant on indigenous territory, offers a fascinating case study that highlights the ways in which high-modernist ideology plays a fundamental role in delineating the types of responses that States can plan and assemble to deal with the ecological problems humanity faces, and how these solutions differ drastically from the approaches of indigenous peoples and other place-based societies. This essay examines the role of education in enforcing the mentality and paradigm of high-modernism and techno-solutionism, to the exclusion and detriment of the ancestral, territorial and autonomous solutions developed by rooted indigenous cultures.

Featured Image

Photo by Mathijs Beks on Unsplash

Photo by Mathijs Beks on Unsplash

Why is it important?

If many of the ecological crises are indeed predicaments to be lived with, rather than problems to be solved, what humanity may need is the humility and unpretentiousness to learn from alternative modes of thought and livelihoods. And who better to teach the values of proper scale, necessary restraint, and the obligatory prudence in designing human societies that “fit” into their places than indigenous peoples and other place-based cultures around the world?