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1 year ago in Environmental Science , Political Ecology By Jessica
How do technocrats or capitalists view the environment compared to indigenous peoples?
In my work on environmental policy, I constantly encounter a fundamental tension. Project proposals from engineering or corporate teams frame nature as a set of "resources" and "ecosystem services," while Indigenous community partners speak of kinship and reciprocal responsibility. I'm trying to articulate these divergent paradigms not as a cliché, but as deeply rooted epistemic frameworks that shape everything from land use to environmental impact assessment.
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By Krupa Answered 2 years ago
From my experience mediating between these perspectives, the difference is ontological, not just semantic. The technocratic-capitalist lens is fundamentally instrumentalist; it views the environment as a stock of separable, fungible resources to be optimized, measured, and traded. Its knowledge is reductionist. In contrast, Indigenous frameworks I've engaged with are typically relational and constitutive. The land is not a resource one has, but a kin-based community one is part of; knowledge is situated, experiential, and embedded in story and practice. This isn't a simple contrast of good and bad, but of fundamentally different ways of "being in the world."
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