The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 149

Ecuador issued a new constitution that has garnered international attention because
of its pioneering treatment of the rights of nature. On par with human rights, nature
is endowed, constitutionally, with the right to be protected and to be treated with
respect. In this conceptualization, nature is no longer seen as an inert object for
humans to appropriate. According to Escobar ( Forthcoming ), nature's inclusion in
the Ecuadorian Constitution is based on an ecological worldview in which all beings
exist in relation to others. As Escobar explains:
To endow Nature with rights means to shift from a conception of nature as object to be
exploited to one in which Nature is seen as subject; indeed, in this conception the idea of
rights of Nature is intimately linked with the humans' right to exist. This notion implies an
expanded ecological notion of the self, which, unlike the liberal notion, sees the self as
deeply inter-connected with all other living beings and, ultimately, with the planet as a
whole (Forthcoming, 66).
What these examples illustrate, as do many others, is the power of grassroots
global movements, in collaboration with other institutions, to foster resilience in
sites vulnerable to economic globalization and global environmental change.
We are suggesting that Earth stewardship in the Anthropocene requires an
engagement with new forms of environmental politics. It also requires paying atten-
tion to multiple forms of environmental knowledge and to transdisciplinary
approaches that reach beyond the standard players in collaborative conservation
efforts. For example, at the southern end of the Americas the collaboration among
artists, artisans from the indigenous community, philosophers, journalists, teachers,
the tourism sector, and scientists have generated novel education, and conservation
practices, and decision making (Box 10.5 ). As another example, the NSF-funded
Coweeta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project has been conducting
ground-breaking ecological research for over 30 years in the eastern deciduous for-
ests of the southern Appalachian Mountains. As a long-term collaboration between
the University of Georgia (UGA) and the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) Forest Service, it has shown that producing scientifi c knowledge about
complex, place-based, ecological issues in a manner that makes information rele-
vant to local policy makers and citizens alike presents extreme challenges. At the
same time, democratically co-producing ecological knowledge will become more
and more important within the era of uneven anthropogenic development. Coweeta
LTER researchers have thus initiated the “Coweeta Listening Project” (CLP) to
address the long-standing diffi culties of scientifi c knowledge production being done
in democratic and “user-friendly” ways that better help inform community mem-
bers in making the diffi cult ecological decisions they face amidst rampant exurban
development.
The model for the CLP is explicitly based on the “spiral model of learning”
(Fig. 10.6 ). This model comes from the traditions of community based participatory
research, and the pedagogic traditions of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Myles
Horton, among others. Through the creation of the CLP, Coweeta scientists have
worked toward the ideal that dialogic participation and interaction is necessary to
create the kind of refl exive socio-ecological science that can help transcend the
limitations of “expert only” science, and move toward more evenly distributed and