Text by David gé Bartoli, Sophie Gosselin, Marin Schaffner et Stefan Kristensen
Translation by Emiliano Guaraldo
Drawings by Clémence Mathieu
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September 16, 2024
From 20 to 23 April 2024, meetings were held in Geneva on the establishment of a Diplomatic Council for River Basins. A bioregional mirror of the UN, this budding institution aims to explore the contours of an alternative terrestrial geopolitics, inventing itself from territories undergoing profound mutations. Here are its main political and theoretical orientations.
Considering:
● that the glaciers during the springs are melting, that the water cycle is becoming deregulated and that salt waters are rising,
● that rivers and streams are progressively acquiring legal personality throughout the world,
● that Switzerland is home to the sources of four major European river basins: the Rhône, the Rhine, the Inn (a tributary of the Danube) and the Ticino (a tributary of the Po),
● that Geneva is an anthropocentric international diplomatic centre that does not really take into account the ongoing ecological imbalances,
We propose to establish a Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins on the shores of Lake Geneva. This potential institution will aim to bring to the fore the voices of the various entities that have hitherto been made invisible (mountains, waterways, forests, animals, plants, etc.) which are nonetheless the essential agents of the life of the hydrographic basins, and whose health is now threatened.
· · ·
There is no doubt: climate change is transforming the face of the Earth. This context of general upheaval forces us to reconsider the ways of living and inscribing ourselves in changing territories. Water, a necessary condition for life on earth, is the element from which a new policy of vital interdependencies is being recomposed.
The political institutions inherited from modernity seem increasingly powerless to respond to the multiplication of socio-ecological and health catastrophes, when they do not reinforce the causes of these catastrophes by supporting extractivist and productivist economic logics that accentuate social and environmental injustices even further.
This is why communities everywhere are organizing themselves to defend and care for their rivers, their forests, their mountains, demanding recognition of rights to the ecosystems in which they live, asserting their attachment to the multiplicity of beings that populate their territory of life, creating networks of solidarity and mutual aid to support the most vulnerable (both human and non-human). Many of these initiatives come from countries in the Global South. As inhabitants of the modern West, we are confronted with the imperialist logic that has presided over these upheavals and with the need to decolonize the ways of inhabiting the world. From these transformative perspectives, we wish to rethink diplomatic questions in an ecological and therefore terrestrial way.
From the Juntas de Buen Gobierno of the Zapatista mountains (Mexico), from the attempts at confederated ecological communes in Rojava (Kurdistan), from the massive agricultural demonstrations in India, from the desert re-greening practices in the Sahel, from the recognition of the legal subjecthood of rivers (Whanganui in New Zealand and Atrato in Colombia) and lagoons (Mar Menor in Spain), from the Australian permaculture garden networks... In short, from all the inhabiting, re-inhabiting, peasant and indigenous initiatives of the world, we wish to say that the current rules of diplomacy do not suit us and seem to us both belligerent and obsolete.
Closer to home and as a direct echo of all the ways of working with and caring for their territory, several initiatives have flourished in Switzerland and France in recent years to give institutional translations to various population dynamics: the Limousin Mountain Syndicate, the Drôme Biovalley, the Assemblies of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the Zones of communal ecology of Lentillères (Dijon), the Parliament of the Loire and the Popular Assembly of the Rhône, and many others.
These founding initiatives are no longer seen primarily within the boundaries defined by the administrative divisions of modern nation-states, but follow the cycles of water and land that determine the renewal of different forms of life. They thus contribute to the emergence of a new political geography capable of keeping up with the shocks of a shaken planet: what we might call a geopolitics of river basins.
A river basin is the territory covered by a river and all its tributaries. Each basin is a world unto itself, supporting myriads of human and non-human lives. From the dividing lines that surround a river basin, all drops of water flow inexorably to the sea. Hydrographic basins are therefore the veins of the Earth1.
In the wake of these new institutional dynamics, there is a growing need to invent, on a European scale, spaces for encounter and dialogue that will accompany the recomposition of these emerging political territorialities. The research-creation launched by this Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins seeks to respond to this need. Together with the United Nations in Geneva, the Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins aims to explore the institutional contours of a terrestrial geopolitics capable of responding to the challenges of changing territories. In this sense, the Geneva territory appears to be both a neural centre and a meeting point. A neural centre, because it is located at the heart of a true natural continental water castle; because it is located on the shores of the largest Alpine lake; because it is the international capital of anthropocentric diplomacy; because it is the site of the future circular collider (one of the largest European industrial projects). But it is also a meeting point, because it is a cross border agglomeration in the midst of redefinition; because, in a telluric movement, the snow-free Alps gradually rise.
A river basin is the territory covered by a river and all its tributaries. Each basin is a world unto itself, supporting myriads of human and non-human lives. From the dividing lines that surround a river basin, all drops of water flow inexorably to the sea. Hydrographic basins are therefore the veins of the Earth1.
In the wake of these new institutional dynamics, there is a growing need to invent, on a European scale, spaces for encounter and dialogue that will accompany the recomposition of these emerging political territorialities. The research-creation launched by this Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins seeks to respond to this need. Together with the United Nations in Geneva, the Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins aims to explore the institutional contours of a terrestrial geopolitics capable of responding to the challenges of changing territories. In this sense, the Geneva territory appears to be both a neural centre and a meeting point. A neural centre, because it is located at the heart of a true natural continental water castle; because it is located on the shores of the largest Alpine lake; because it is the international capital of anthropocentric diplomacy; because it is the site of the future circular collider (one of the largest European industrial projects). But it is also a meeting point, because it is a cross border agglomeration in the midst of redefinition; because, in a telluric movement, the snow-free Alps gradually rise.
1. Starting from re-inhabiting communities: taking care of living environments
Despite the expansion of extractive and neoliberal capitalism in all four corners of the world, “re-inhabitant” communities persist and unfold, time and again, in the interstices of an increasingly uniform and monocultural world. The notion of re-inhabitation comes to us from the bioregionalist movement. “Everywhere, communities of people are emerging, attempting new ways of living on and with the Earth,”2 wrote Peter Berg, an environmental activist, and Raymond Dasmann, a biologist, in their seminal article “Re-inhabiting California” in 1976.
In recent decades in France, we can cite, for example, the experiences of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes (and its famous “We are nature defending itself”), that of the Syndicat de la Montagne Limousin (an autonomous and multicultural residents’ union), that of the Comité Loire Vivante (a collective of collectives which, at the end of the 1980s, federated at the level of the Loire river basin to fight against the construction of four large dams) and which found a recent extension in the process of the Loire Parliament, or also that of the Biovalle du Drôme around a renewal of agricultural practices to care for the territory.
1.1. Living territories
These different dynamics of inhabitants (and institutions) put different strategies into practice: defense of the earth’s common goods, rights of nature, permacultural practices, etc. But what they have in common is the rethinking of territorialities (attachments to places) from the ways of living and the alliances between humans and non-humans. The challenges are multiple: rediscovering the link with the land, combining ecological justice and social justice, caring for interdependencies by and through re-inhabiting practices... In all cases, a redefinition of the territory is at stake.
Indeed, from these new perspectives, territory is no longer a portion of space managed by an administration, but a dynamic network that brings together a plurality of ways of life. From this ecocentric (and no longer anthropocentric) perspective, the permanent metamorphosis of our living environments invites us to rethink from top to bottom the ethical considerations that underpin our political decisions. Or, as Peter Berg said in 1986: “The place where you live is alive, and you are part of its life. What then are your obligations in this regard, what is your responsibility in the face of the fact that this place welcomes and nourishes you?”3 In the wake of the bioregionalist vision, our question is then the following: how can we make people from and with living environments? And this in a perspective where these peoples are not already constituted entities, but peoples that are constituted in and through the alliances they weave with the different ways of life that make up the fabric of a complex and changing territory, the fabric of a “body-territory”4.
1.2. Earth peoples
From the territories of the living – and therefore from the “body-territories”5 – the possibility of an expanded “we” is invented, more than human, redrawing the borders (always open and welcoming) of our communities of life and the lines of separation and passage between humans and non-humans, giving birth to ways of making people that no longer respond to the anthropocentric and nationalist coordinates inherited from modernity: river-people, mountain-people, forest-people, coastal-people6. In most cases, water has proven to be the link that allows for the forging of new relationships between a “territory” and a way of making “people.”
“Like the cardiovascular network that distributes oxygen and nutrients essential for life to our vital organs, the hydrographic network is the vehicle that transports living beings, irrigates the land and crosses terrestrial bodies to connect them to each other within plural and living bodies-territories: from the glacier to the river, from the spring to the estuary, from the land to the sea, from the clouds to the forests, from the rain to the aquifers... Water connects bodies, territories and continents. It draws borders other than those arbitrarily established by modern nation-states: zones of encounter and transition from which it is possible to relearn how to build a community, to create new alliances between humans and non-humans.”7
It is from the basins that we wish to consider both the issues of the ecological ways of life that we defend and, by extension, their institutional translations.
1.3 Watershed institutions
What institutions can terrestrial peoples give birth to?
These re-inhabiting dynamics invite us to question the meaning of the notion of “institution”. Because, in fact, the vast majority of our political and social institutions are inherited institutions that reproduce anthropocentric and patriarchal principles of domination (thus based on forms of racial and gender domination and relegating natural beings to being no more than resources). How then can we consider that they could be adapted to these radically different ways of inhabiting and living?
What interests us here, therefore, is not the fixed, instituted devices, but the instituting processes - those that would be capable of accompanying the permanent metamorphoses of a territory, the inscription in time of the practices of community inhabitants and the ways of making people to which they give birth. In other words, we consider that through such instituting dynamics, it is the territory itself that is instituted as a “earth people.”8 Or rather, it is the alliances between humans and non-humans that should institute the territory as a political entity.
The political imaginary of the federation of river basins, so dear to bioregionalists, can serve as a source of inspiration here, inviting us to make water the primordial commonality of all life, and therefore of all politics. It allows us to contemplate what could be, in all their diversity, peoples of water, capable of shaping hydroworlds: “a set of ecological continuities, always more than human, within which we are immersed, which we make and which make us at every moment, everywhere on the planet.”9 A set of ancestral and existential relations of interdependence and care between communities of life and aquatic environments. And also the idea that these aquatic worlds are at the same time within us, between us and beyond us. Making people from these changing territorialities that are the river basins means rethinking the geopolitical challenges at their roots.
2. Towards water cycle policies: redrawing our interdependencies
At the crossroads of the three preceding notions (territories, peoples, institutions), water policies appear as a particularly interesting touchstone for rethinking the general equation of disaster.
Since 1964 and the creation of the Water Agencies in France, water resource management at the level of river basins has become the norm throughout Europe. Except that here, words matter. And “management” and “resource” are two deeply problematic terms within European water policies. Indeed, the care of resources is almost always considered in an anthropocentric way: river basins serve human uses, and must be managed to continue serving them, without deteriorating too much. A kind of “reasoned” exploitation, which becomes less and less viable as the climate crisis worsens. Therefore , water agencies are a magnificent invention on paper, but they are caught in the web of a systemic way of thinking, advocating utilitarianism and resourcism, as well as the sole representation of interests and their power games in the form of lobbying.
2.1 Re-inhabiting water cycles
Water circulation (surface, underground and atmospheric) operates in multiple cycles. And, faced with the increase in floods and droughts, it seems that respect for these cycles is what must guide us now. In other words, how can we orient ourselves towards “water cycle policies”?10
The first seems to be the recognition of the importance of these cycles within our institutions, since they are the ones that sustain all the dynamics of life, and are being modified by ecological upheaval. The second, which is related, is the extension of democratic challenges beyond the human. This is what the Indian eco-feminist activist Vandana Shiva has called: “earth democracy”: contemplating modes of organization that are always respectful of all the facets of our great earthly family.11
What we desperately need are more-than-human commons, biocultural commons: that is, shared living environments within which human modes of organization allow all other nonhumans (and life cycles more broadly) to develop as freely as possible.
2.2 Permaculture and the politics of the commons
Permaculture, based on the observation and imitation of natural cycles, thus appears here as an inspiring ethic. Founded in the 1970s in Australia and now spread across the planet, it redefines the notion of “commons” in a post-industrial and sustainable perspective (care of places and lowering energy consumption). In this, permaculture proposes rethinking the place of humans within their environments and re-inscribing agricultural practice within the horizon of a more general ecological culture based on care. Conceiving environments that feed us without ever harming them, is an ethic that reconnects with ancient indigenous and peasant practices, and that appears to be fruitful in stopping disaster.
Since its creation, permaculture has also explicitly relied on two other fundamental currents in the reformulation of the problem of cohabitation that we are trying to rethink here: communalism and bioregionalism. One with its autonomous confederated ecological communes, the other with its river basin councils, these two approaches are equally pillars for rethinking the vital common that is water. And even more so, for trying to forge a new “direct water democracy”.12
After this, it is a matter of putting the questions of subsistence back at the heart of our daily lives. Because there is no true ecological subsistence without policies of cycles: the seasons, the moon, the waters, the life of the soil... From this point of view, there are fundamental rights - those of subsistence - of which we are collectively deprived by the mercantile and extractive society that encloses us. And it is a matter of finding ways to ‘claim’ these rights (the term reclaim, dear to ecofeminists, means at the same time to claim, reappropriate and repair). The creation of a Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins is one of them.
2.3 Water to regenerate our interdependencies
To give a concrete example of this, let us recall Hatakeyama Shigeatsu, a Japanese oyster farmer who, faced with the pollution of his Kesennuma Bay and the massive death of his oysters, had the idea of creating a large tree-replanting movement with the villages upstream of his small coastal river. The water thus purified – naturally, but with the intelligence of the local human communities – allowed the oysters to grow again. The magnificent account of this experience, entitled The Sea Loving Forest13, immerses us with great simplicity in the tasks that concern us today: those of defending the functionality and permanence of natural cycles. The search for the invention of “water cycle policies” thus appears as a method – at once artistic, political and scientific – to question our ways of welcoming events. What lies behind such an approach is therefore the desire to conceive and ensure a true ecological hospitality on an increasingly disturbed planet.
3. Earth rights and democracy of the living: for an intermundial world of water people
These ways of inhabiting living environments and caring for the living find an important source of inspiration in the resistance and persistence of the peoples of the South, in particular indigenous peoples who, for centuries, have sought to defend their lands and conditions of subsistence against the logic of colonial hoarding and destruction.
3.1 The rights of Mother Earth
In the context of Latin America, indigenous struggles have thus taken over from a decomposing workers’ movement, redefining the meaning and horizon of political conflict. If we are to combat socio-economic inequalities and domination, we must
also combat all other forms of domination, including patriarchal and colonial domination based on cosmocide and ecocide14: on the destruction of the plurality of ways of worldmaking and living environments. The particularity of these struggles is that they combine social justice and ecological justice. This is expressed in the various declarations that have emerged in Latin America around the recognition of the rights of Mother Earth (or Pachamama): “Just as human beings enjoy human rights, all other beings have rights proper to their species or type and adapted to the role and function they exercise within the communities in which they exist.”15
If the Earth can be likened to a mother, it is because it constitutes the generative power of all forms of life. It is therefore a question of creating the conditions for the regeneration of the cycles of life by caring for this “indivisible community of life composed of interdependent beings intimately linked to each other by a common destiny”16, as is put into practice in “buen vivir”17 – a formula that designates a communal way of life based on a holistic approach to the relations between humans and non-humans.
Permaculture, based on the observation and imitation of natural cycles, thus appears here as an inspiring ethic. Founded in the 1970s in Australia and now spread across the planet, it redefines the notion of “commons” in a post-industrial and sustainable perspective (care of places and lowering energy consumption). In this, permaculture proposes rethinking the place of humans within their environments and re-inscribing agricultural practice within the horizon of a more general ecological culture based on care. Conceiving environments that feed us without ever harming them, is an ethic that reconnects with ancient indigenous and peasant practices, and that appears to be fruitful in stopping disaster.
Since its creation, permaculture has also explicitly relied on two other fundamental currents in the reformulation of the problem of cohabitation that we are trying to rethink here: communalism and bioregionalism. One with its autonomous confederated ecological communes, the other with its river basin councils, these two approaches are equally pillars for rethinking the vital common that is water. And even more so, for trying to forge a new “direct water democracy”.12
After this, it is a matter of putting the questions of subsistence back at the heart of our daily lives. Because there is no true ecological subsistence without policies of cycles: the seasons, the moon, the waters, the life of the soil... From this point of view, there are fundamental rights - those of subsistence - of which we are collectively deprived by the mercantile and extractive society that encloses us. And it is a matter of finding ways to ‘claim’ these rights (the term reclaim, dear to ecofeminists, means at the same time to claim, reappropriate and repair). The creation of a Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins is one of them.
2.3 Water to regenerate our interdependencies
To give a concrete example of this, let us recall Hatakeyama Shigeatsu, a Japanese oyster farmer who, faced with the pollution of his Kesennuma Bay and the massive death of his oysters, had the idea of creating a large tree-replanting movement with the villages upstream of his small coastal river. The water thus purified – naturally, but with the intelligence of the local human communities – allowed the oysters to grow again. The magnificent account of this experience, entitled The Sea Loving Forest13, immerses us with great simplicity in the tasks that concern us today: those of defending the functionality and permanence of natural cycles. The search for the invention of “water cycle policies” thus appears as a method – at once artistic, political and scientific – to question our ways of welcoming events. What lies behind such an approach is therefore the desire to conceive and ensure a true ecological hospitality on an increasingly disturbed planet.
3. Earth rights and democracy of the living: for an intermundial world of water people
These ways of inhabiting living environments and caring for the living find an important source of inspiration in the resistance and persistence of the peoples of the South, in particular indigenous peoples who, for centuries, have sought to defend their lands and conditions of subsistence against the logic of colonial hoarding and destruction.
3.1 The rights of Mother Earth
In the context of Latin America, indigenous struggles have thus taken over from a decomposing workers’ movement, redefining the meaning and horizon of political conflict. If we are to combat socio-economic inequalities and domination, we must
also combat all other forms of domination, including patriarchal and colonial domination based on cosmocide and ecocide14: on the destruction of the plurality of ways of worldmaking and living environments. The particularity of these struggles is that they combine social justice and ecological justice. This is expressed in the various declarations that have emerged in Latin America around the recognition of the rights of Mother Earth (or Pachamama): “Just as human beings enjoy human rights, all other beings have rights proper to their species or type and adapted to the role and function they exercise within the communities in which they exist.”15
If the Earth can be likened to a mother, it is because it constitutes the generative power of all forms of life. It is therefore a question of creating the conditions for the regeneration of the cycles of life by caring for this “indivisible community of life composed of interdependent beings intimately linked to each other by a common destiny”16, as is put into practice in “buen vivir”17 – a formula that designates a communal way of life based on a holistic approach to the relations between humans and non-humans.
3.2 River institutions and river narratives
Indigenous struggles and declarations of the rights of Mother Earth in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2010) have prompted a series of important institutional innovations on all continents of the planet: in Colombia, India, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Canada. In the European context, the years 2019-2021 have also seen the blossoming of several initiatives: in the Loire, the Rhône, the Tavignanu, groups of inhabitants are demanding recognition of rights for their rivers or for the ecosystem in which they live.
More recently, in October 2023, the Mar Menor lagoon (in Murcia, Spain) was the subject of a popular law validated by the Spanish Senate that recognises it as a legal entity. These claims are not limited to an instrumental use of law that reduces personality to a “legal fiction” that can be attributed to non-individual subjects (as for associations, companies, States), much more, they accompany or translate deeper social and cultural transformations that bring into play the way in which the inhabitants of a territory contemplate their relationships with all living beings18. They give rise to the emergence, in the Western context, of new potential forms of inventive autochtonies, and draw the contours of a democracy of the living on the scale of territories of life. It is therefore urgent to invent river-institutions and the river stories19 that accompany them.
3.3 Water peoples and their hydroworlds
If we take the paradigmatic case of the personalisation of the Whanganui River by the Maori peoples of New Zealand, it is the river ecosystem in its entirety and its uniqueness, with the human collectives that inhabit its banks, that is recognised as a legal entity under the name of Te Awa Tupua. As the Maori adage “I am the river and the river is me” indicates, the territory of the river is considered less as a set of natural resources or as a surface to be organized than as a collective, relational and open entity. From this perspective, the social bond between humans forms a body with the territory, that is, with the set of life forms that traverse it and are interwoven within it. The objective of “good politics” is no longer to act only in the interest of human societies independently of their relations with non-humans, but rather from the point of view of the environment itself, that is, taking into account the health and well-being of the different relational scales that constitute the collective subject of the river. Human beings thus become members of a body territory that participate in regenerating, reactivating or reinventing vernacular gestures, knowledge and know-how to renew alliances with non-humans and give birth to water peoples and their hydroworlds.
3.4 A pluriversal Earth
If the state institutions erected in modern times in Europe responded to the delegitimization of the political regime of divine right (replacing divine authority with the authority of a Humanity giving itself its own laws), the rights of the Earth correspond to the emergence of a new source of authority and normativity: that of the Earth itself. Non-humans, animals, forests, soils, waters, winds, burst into the social and political space to question its foundations and make visible the bonds of interdependence that unite us to them. In their wake, the ways of making the world of peoples and all the forms of life annihilated by modernizing colonization are also the ones that are resurfacing, drawing the horizon of pluriversal democracies20, capable of linking a plurality of worlds from living territories. The Earth at stake here is less the globe, that abstract and uniformizing totality governable from the position of a rootless expertise, than an inhabited Earth, composed of a plurality of worlds: an Earth-worlds, a pluriverse. The challenge of a terrestrial diplomacy therefore consists in accompanying the emergence of the different ways of worldmaking, and in making their dialogue and interaction possible: in other words, working for the constitution of an inter-world of the peoples of the water.
Indigenous struggles and declarations of the rights of Mother Earth in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2010) have prompted a series of important institutional innovations on all continents of the planet: in Colombia, India, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Canada. In the European context, the years 2019-2021 have also seen the blossoming of several initiatives: in the Loire, the Rhône, the Tavignanu, groups of inhabitants are demanding recognition of rights for their rivers or for the ecosystem in which they live.
More recently, in October 2023, the Mar Menor lagoon (in Murcia, Spain) was the subject of a popular law validated by the Spanish Senate that recognises it as a legal entity. These claims are not limited to an instrumental use of law that reduces personality to a “legal fiction” that can be attributed to non-individual subjects (as for associations, companies, States), much more, they accompany or translate deeper social and cultural transformations that bring into play the way in which the inhabitants of a territory contemplate their relationships with all living beings18. They give rise to the emergence, in the Western context, of new potential forms of inventive autochtonies, and draw the contours of a democracy of the living on the scale of territories of life. It is therefore urgent to invent river-institutions and the river stories19 that accompany them.
3.3 Water peoples and their hydroworlds
If we take the paradigmatic case of the personalisation of the Whanganui River by the Maori peoples of New Zealand, it is the river ecosystem in its entirety and its uniqueness, with the human collectives that inhabit its banks, that is recognised as a legal entity under the name of Te Awa Tupua. As the Maori adage “I am the river and the river is me” indicates, the territory of the river is considered less as a set of natural resources or as a surface to be organized than as a collective, relational and open entity. From this perspective, the social bond between humans forms a body with the territory, that is, with the set of life forms that traverse it and are interwoven within it. The objective of “good politics” is no longer to act only in the interest of human societies independently of their relations with non-humans, but rather from the point of view of the environment itself, that is, taking into account the health and well-being of the different relational scales that constitute the collective subject of the river. Human beings thus become members of a body territory that participate in regenerating, reactivating or reinventing vernacular gestures, knowledge and know-how to renew alliances with non-humans and give birth to water peoples and their hydroworlds.
3.4 A pluriversal Earth
If the state institutions erected in modern times in Europe responded to the delegitimization of the political regime of divine right (replacing divine authority with the authority of a Humanity giving itself its own laws), the rights of the Earth correspond to the emergence of a new source of authority and normativity: that of the Earth itself. Non-humans, animals, forests, soils, waters, winds, burst into the social and political space to question its foundations and make visible the bonds of interdependence that unite us to them. In their wake, the ways of making the world of peoples and all the forms of life annihilated by modernizing colonization are also the ones that are resurfacing, drawing the horizon of pluriversal democracies20, capable of linking a plurality of worlds from living territories. The Earth at stake here is less the globe, that abstract and uniformizing totality governable from the position of a rootless expertise, than an inhabited Earth, composed of a plurality of worlds: an Earth-worlds, a pluriverse. The challenge of a terrestrial diplomacy therefore consists in accompanying the emergence of the different ways of worldmaking, and in making their dialogue and interaction possible: in other words, working for the constitution of an inter-world of the peoples of the water.
4. Land diplomacy and politics of hospitality: creating situated alliances and solidarity networks
The horizon of a pluriversal Earth forces us to reinvent the forms of diplomacy. Because the challenge is no longer just, as in the modern state-national paradigm, to avoid war between States21 by assuming war as the basis of politics22, but to negotiate the interdependencies that condition the renewal of the different forms of life on Earth.
4.1 Hospitality Policies
The increase in climatic instability will increasingly endanger the possibility of living (habitability) in many places around the world, without being able to fully predict how: climate refugees, droughts and pollution, soils increasingly unable to feed us, etc. Today we are faced – even if we are reluctant to – with a whole series of new challenges to hospitality.
The modern model of state diplomacy is inadequate to respond to them, since the political paradigm on which it is based is that of a national sovereignty that owns a territory to defend against a “foreigner” always perceived as potentially hostile. Playing on the double meaning of the Greek word “hostis”, which means both enemy and guest (guest and host), we could say that the challenge of terrestrial diplomacy is to transform the enemy into a guest23, and therefore the politics of war into the politics of hospitality.
This poses new challenges that question the fundamental values of our political modernity: How to care for a polluted river? How to respond to the mass death of species? How to listen to a melting glacier and the relationships of interdependence that condition it and that it contributes to feeding? How to join forces upstream and downstream of the river to regenerate the cycles of life? How to respond collectively to floods, inundations, large fires, storms? How and at what scales to renew solidarity between living beings, taking into account the specificities of each territory and the different ways of inhabiting it? These are the questions that the terrestrial diplomacy to which we are paving the way must attempt to answer.
This can only be defined on the basis of the demands of the inhabiting communities, because they are the ones who, first of all, suffer and will suffer the consequences of ecological disasters.
4.2. A diplomacy for agonistic conflicts
These destabilizations are likely to increase conflicts over terrestrial commons (water, land, air), with the threat that certain groups will try to establish their domination or monopolize these commons to the detriment of others. So, how can we collectively address these conflicts without reproducing the political model of war, of opposition between friends and enemies24 that always involves the victory of one side by the annihilation or submission of the other? How can we confront conflicts from a perspective of care and hospitality?
To do this, we believe it is necessary to revise the model of political action from top to bottom by putting into practice an agonistic policy25. This changes the nature of diplomacy, since the primary objective is no longer to defend the interests of one group or another against those of another, but to accompany the processes of collective transformation by considering the tensions, conflicts of use and conflicts of worlds that arise in the experience of cohabitation of territories. For example: by showing the incompatibility between certain chains of interdependence (corn, pesticides, intensive production, long-distance transport, oil consumption) and their own conditions of existence (presence of water, biodiversity, fertility of the land); by trying to articulate new chains of interdependence; or by creating new alliances and transversalities between groups of inhabitants. Agon operates “a decentering of individuals in favor of the relationships that condition their existence within a place of common life, taking into account the way in which the different beings that inhabit or frequent the place are affected by the conflict.”26 It opens the space-time of a negotiation of interdependencies.
From the perspective of an agonistic policy, the horizon of terrestrial diplomacy is to think and propose the conditions for welcoming the other on whom one depends, making possible the reciprocal transformation that this welcome demands: giving in exchange for what has been given to us, recognizing the bond of obligation that the gift institutes.
The diplomat acts on the threshold, on the border, on the dividing line, but his objective is no longer to guarantee the immunity of the collective (national) body against the foreigner. On the contrary, he must now seek to negotiate the forms of passage, transition and transformation: a liaison agent guaranteeing the counter-gift. Diplomatic action can therefore be seen not only as the translation between two cultures (political, linguistic, cultural and social), but as a process of transduction to the service of a collective metamorphosis, in the sense that transduction designates “the operation by which two or more orders of incommensurable realities enter into resonance and become commensurable by the invention of a dimension that articulates them and by the passage to an order richer in structures.”27
The diplomat is a world-passer28. In order to respond to the diversity of ways of world making and to make dialogue possible, diplomacy cannot be conceived as pre-existing the conflict in the form of a constituted body; it must be invented, in a situation, taking into account the singularity of the conflict that has arisen. Diplomatic action therefore consists in the invention of spaces and functions capable of articulating transduction by negotiating the terrestrial alliances necessary for the renewal of the different forms of life that weave the web of bodies-territories.
It contributes to putting into practice what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls “pluriversal contact zones”: spaces-times of encounter and transition between worlds and ways of inhabiting territories.
4.3 Caring for bodies-territories
Land diplomacy makes sense in the light of a triple gesture:
1. Addressing conflicts where they arise, that is, in the areas of life itself, with the actors and actresses concerned, in order to collectively try to heal the wounds inflicted by ecological catastrophes and to confront the logic of hoarding and domination.
2. Caring for vital interdependencies by inventing situated ecosocialities and solidarities between humans and non-humans.
3. Create the conditions for intercultural and interspecific dialogue to make possible the cohabitation between a plurality of ways of making the world.
Land diplomacy must contribute to drawing up other divisions and passages within the territories inhabited in common. In this sense, it constitutes an essential element of recompositing political territorialities from and with the cycles of life on the horizon of a pluriversal Earth.
5. A diplomatic council in the Lake Geneva area: an institutional process for United Mountainsides
Geneva is strategically located in the heart of the Rhône river basin. But it is also a city that has maintained an ambiguous relationship with its territory since the Middle Ages. The Reformation made Geneva an independent city, an island in the middle of hostile territory; and then the accession to the Swiss Confederation after the Napoleonic Wars gave it a status of neutrality and impartiality. From then on, as Geneva was not anchored to its territory, it could be the place where states discussed their differences, where the various constituted and recognized political bodies of the planet could meet calmly.
5.1 Leman: a place of inter-global diplomacy
However, Geneva is a real city, surrounded by real countryside, on the shores of a real lake, Lake Geneva, and through which flows the Rhône and several of its tributaries, in particular the Arve, but also smaller rivers such as the Allondon or the Laire. The Geneva metropolitan area also has the particularity of being divided between two States, with its Swiss part almost embedded in French territory, with only 6 km of common border with the rest of Switzerland. The challenges of cross border governance are complex and difficult to address, in particular because political territories do not have the same powers locally, even if the challenges related to rivers are becoming increasingly crucial, as can be seen with regard to the flow of the Rhône - which depends in the long term on the preservation of glaciers at its source, and which is necessary for the French economy since several nuclear power plants are located along its course.
Land diplomacy makes sense in the light of a triple gesture:
1. Addressing conflicts where they arise, that is, in the areas of life itself, with the actors and actresses concerned, in order to collectively try to heal the wounds inflicted by ecological catastrophes and to confront the logic of hoarding and domination.
2. Caring for vital interdependencies by inventing situated ecosocialities and solidarities between humans and non-humans.
3. Create the conditions for intercultural and interspecific dialogue to make possible the cohabitation between a plurality of ways of making the world.
Land diplomacy must contribute to drawing up other divisions and passages within the territories inhabited in common. In this sense, it constitutes an essential element of recompositing political territorialities from and with the cycles of life on the horizon of a pluriversal Earth.
5. A diplomatic council in the Lake Geneva area: an institutional process for United Mountainsides
Geneva is strategically located in the heart of the Rhône river basin. But it is also a city that has maintained an ambiguous relationship with its territory since the Middle Ages. The Reformation made Geneva an independent city, an island in the middle of hostile territory; and then the accession to the Swiss Confederation after the Napoleonic Wars gave it a status of neutrality and impartiality. From then on, as Geneva was not anchored to its territory, it could be the place where states discussed their differences, where the various constituted and recognized political bodies of the planet could meet calmly.
5.1 Leman: a place of inter-global diplomacy
However, Geneva is a real city, surrounded by real countryside, on the shores of a real lake, Lake Geneva, and through which flows the Rhône and several of its tributaries, in particular the Arve, but also smaller rivers such as the Allondon or the Laire. The Geneva metropolitan area also has the particularity of being divided between two States, with its Swiss part almost embedded in French territory, with only 6 km of common border with the rest of Switzerland. The challenges of cross border governance are complex and difficult to address, in particular because political territories do not have the same powers locally, even if the challenges related to rivers are becoming increasingly crucial, as can be seen with regard to the flow of the Rhône - which depends in the long term on the preservation of glaciers at its source, and which is necessary for the French economy since several nuclear power plants are located along its course.
5.2 For a Europe of United Mountainsides
Geneva is thus defined by a long experience of human diplomacy and by a contradictory and complex relationship with its own territory. Since the end of the last century, Geneva has also begun to take care of its waterways, with major renaturalization projects, in particular on the Aire and the Seymaz (tributaries of the Arve), carried out between 2000 and 2010. Geneva is also a Swiss city, a country that welcomes in its Alpine territory the outlets of two of the main rivers of Western Europe, the Rhine and the Rhone, but also the Inn and the Ticino (two major tributaries of the Danube and the Po). With its numerous glaciers, Switzerland has also been able to be considered the “water castle of Europe”. These rivers cross borders, so that a reflection on the watersheds is, from the outset, from a Swiss perspective, a cross-border challenge - unlike the Loire, which belongs to only one nation. Finally, Geneva is also a place of non-state and informal diplomacy with a large number of NGOs and citizen groups active on all kinds of issues. This city is a place of encounters.
For all these reasons, it seems appropriate to establish the Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins in Geneva, which has a unique experience both spatially and historically.
5.3 An Earth Council for a pluriversal culture
The Diplomatic Council of River Basins will be a space for dialogue between the different constituent dynamics in the territories at European and global level. A space for dialogue where human and non-human actors and actresses will be able to exchange, taking sides for their places of life, and for the challenges and struggles that are imposed to maintain and make flourish the environments that unfold there. It is conceived, from Geneva, as a space open to the world conflicts found within the various European and global river basins.
The Diplomatic Council of River Basins also aims to provide re-sources for thought and struggle, with a view to the progressive autonomy of the river basin territories and their confederation. The reflections arising from all the unique experiences on the different continents must be shared with a view to a real inter-world coordination of indigenous ways of life. It will also be a place of debate on the political and legal strategies best suited to making the voice of non-human actors and actresses recognized.
Geneva is thus defined by a long experience of human diplomacy and by a contradictory and complex relationship with its own territory. Since the end of the last century, Geneva has also begun to take care of its waterways, with major renaturalization projects, in particular on the Aire and the Seymaz (tributaries of the Arve), carried out between 2000 and 2010. Geneva is also a Swiss city, a country that welcomes in its Alpine territory the outlets of two of the main rivers of Western Europe, the Rhine and the Rhone, but also the Inn and the Ticino (two major tributaries of the Danube and the Po). With its numerous glaciers, Switzerland has also been able to be considered the “water castle of Europe”. These rivers cross borders, so that a reflection on the watersheds is, from the outset, from a Swiss perspective, a cross-border challenge - unlike the Loire, which belongs to only one nation. Finally, Geneva is also a place of non-state and informal diplomacy with a large number of NGOs and citizen groups active on all kinds of issues. This city is a place of encounters.
For all these reasons, it seems appropriate to establish the Diplomatic Council of Hydrographic Basins in Geneva, which has a unique experience both spatially and historically.
5.3 An Earth Council for a pluriversal culture
The Diplomatic Council of River Basins will be a space for dialogue between the different constituent dynamics in the territories at European and global level. A space for dialogue where human and non-human actors and actresses will be able to exchange, taking sides for their places of life, and for the challenges and struggles that are imposed to maintain and make flourish the environments that unfold there. It is conceived, from Geneva, as a space open to the world conflicts found within the various European and global river basins.
The Diplomatic Council of River Basins also aims to provide re-sources for thought and struggle, with a view to the progressive autonomy of the river basin territories and their confederation. The reflections arising from all the unique experiences on the different continents must be shared with a view to a real inter-world coordination of indigenous ways of life. It will also be a place of debate on the political and legal strategies best suited to making the voice of non-human actors and actresses recognized.
Objectives of the Diplomatic Council
To be a place of interspecific diplomacy to address debates, controversies, and conflicts of use at the scale of watersheds, based on the dynamics of inhabitants;
Become a source-place to make re-inhabitation practices visible and defend the rights and common goods of use;
Thinking about and gathering tools to defend the communities of inhabitants (legal tools, exchange of knowledge and know-how, collective links/associations/ researchers...);
To be a space for dialogue between different institutional strategies (popular assemblies, territorial unions, defence of common goods, rights of nature...);
Produce an ecocentric culture (learning territories, community knowledge, ecological humanities).
April 2024, Geneva.
To be a place of interspecific diplomacy to address debates, controversies, and conflicts of use at the scale of watersheds, based on the dynamics of inhabitants;
Become a source-place to make re-inhabitation practices visible and defend the rights and common goods of use;
Thinking about and gathering tools to defend the communities of inhabitants (legal tools, exchange of knowledge and know-how, collective links/associations/ researchers...);
To be a space for dialogue between different institutional strategies (popular assemblies, territorial unions, defence of common goods, rights of nature...);
Produce an ecocentric culture (learning territories, community knowledge, ecological humanities).
April 2024, Geneva.
This text was written within the framework of the event “Ces jours terrestres”, organized by Utopiana in Geneva, which hosts the project of the Diplomatic Council of River Basins. It has been first published on the platform «Terrestres» in 2024. Learn more about Terrestres here.
About the authors: learn more about the authors here
About the authors: learn more about the authors here
Footnotes
1
See Les Veines de la Terre: une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 202.
2
Voir Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion ?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
3
Ibid.
4
We borrow this expression from Mayan ecofeminist activists in Guatemala. See «’Corps-territoire et territoire-Terre’ : le féminisme communautaire au Guatemala. Entretien avec Lorena Cabnal », Cahiers du Genre, vol. 59, no. 2, 2015, pp. 73-89. See also Vivantes, des femmes qui luttent en Amérique latine, éd. Dehors, 2023.
5
By “body-territory” we mean the web of interdependencies between bodies (human and non-human), from which earthly communities and bioregions are formed. See Sophie Gosselin & David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, éd. du Seuil, 2022, chap. 4.
6
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, Seuil, 2022, chap.4.
7
Sophie Gosselin «Pour une Europe des Versants-Unis», in Reconstruire la pensée européenne, dir. Dominique Bourg, éd. Hermann, 2024.
8
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, Seuil, 2022, chap. 4.
9
See «Pour une intermondiale des bassins-versants», in Les Veines de la Terre : une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
10
To use the title of the symposium organized by Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner in May 2024: https://cerisy-colloques.fr/eau2024/
11
Vandana Shiva, Mémoires terrestres, trad. Marin Schaffner, Rue de l’Echiquier/Wildproject, 2023.
12
See Hydromondes, «La biorégion, creuset d’une démocratie directe de l’eau», Bascules, 2023.
13
Hatakeyama Shigeatsu, La Forêt amante de la mer, Wildproject, 2019.
14
Since December 2021, the European Parliament has legally recognized the crime of ecocide. On the question of ecocide, see Valérie Cabanes, Un nouveau droit pour la Terre, Seuil, 2016.
15
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, adopted in 2010 at the World Conference of Peoples against Climate Change, on the initiative of the Amerindian peoples, who are calling for the UN to adopt the Declaration. https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ENG-Universal-Declaration-of-the-Rights-of-Mother-Earth.pdf
16
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion ?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
17
Pablo Solón, «Le ‘buen vivir’, une autre vision du monde», Revue Projet, vol. 362, no. 1, 2018, pp. 66-72.
18
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, ibid.
19
See «Pour une intermondiale des bassins-versants», in Les Veines de la Terre: une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
20
Plurivers: un dictionnaire du post-développement, Wildproject, 2023.
21
Laurence Badel et Stanislas Jeannesson, «Une histoire globale de la diplomatie ?», Diplomaties , éd. Armand Colin, 2014.
22
As Clausewitz's famous phrase suggests, “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. The very meaning of political activity only seems to make sense against the backdrop of a permanent state of war, articulated around the opposition of friend and foe.
23
Even if it does confuse us. Acceptance of transformation is a condition of hospitality, but also, more generally, of life.
24
See Carl Schmitt, Le nomos de la Terre, PUF, 2001.
25
“Agone” was the ancient Greek term for the art of regulated combat. For an in-depth look at its political meaning, see Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, éd. Seuil, 2022, chap. 3.
26
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
27
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
28
See David gé Bartoli et Sophie Gosselin, Le toucher du monde – techniques du naturer, éd. Dehors, 2019.
1
See Les Veines de la Terre: une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 202.
2
Voir Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion ?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
3
Ibid.
4
We borrow this expression from Mayan ecofeminist activists in Guatemala. See «’Corps-territoire et territoire-Terre’ : le féminisme communautaire au Guatemala. Entretien avec Lorena Cabnal », Cahiers du Genre, vol. 59, no. 2, 2015, pp. 73-89. See also Vivantes, des femmes qui luttent en Amérique latine, éd. Dehors, 2023.
5
By “body-territory” we mean the web of interdependencies between bodies (human and non-human), from which earthly communities and bioregions are formed. See Sophie Gosselin & David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, éd. du Seuil, 2022, chap. 4.
6
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, Seuil, 2022, chap.4.
7
Sophie Gosselin «Pour une Europe des Versants-Unis», in Reconstruire la pensée européenne, dir. Dominique Bourg, éd. Hermann, 2024.
8
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, Seuil, 2022, chap. 4.
9
See «Pour une intermondiale des bassins-versants», in Les Veines de la Terre : une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
10
To use the title of the symposium organized by Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner in May 2024: https://cerisy-colloques.fr/eau2024/
11
Vandana Shiva, Mémoires terrestres, trad. Marin Schaffner, Rue de l’Echiquier/Wildproject, 2023.
12
See Hydromondes, «La biorégion, creuset d’une démocratie directe de l’eau», Bascules, 2023.
13
Hatakeyama Shigeatsu, La Forêt amante de la mer, Wildproject, 2019.
14
Since December 2021, the European Parliament has legally recognized the crime of ecocide. On the question of ecocide, see Valérie Cabanes, Un nouveau droit pour la Terre, Seuil, 2016.
15
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, adopted in 2010 at the World Conference of Peoples against Climate Change, on the initiative of the Amerindian peoples, who are calling for the UN to adopt the Declaration. https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ENG-Universal-Declaration-of-the-Rights-of-Mother-Earth.pdf
16
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion ?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
17
Pablo Solón, «Le ‘buen vivir’, une autre vision du monde», Revue Projet, vol. 362, no. 1, 2018, pp. 66-72.
18
See Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, ibid.
19
See «Pour une intermondiale des bassins-versants», in Les Veines de la Terre: une anthologie des bassins-versants, F. Guerroué, M. Rollot & M. Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
20
Plurivers: un dictionnaire du post-développement, Wildproject, 2023.
21
Laurence Badel et Stanislas Jeannesson, «Une histoire globale de la diplomatie ?», Diplomaties , éd. Armand Colin, 2014.
22
As Clausewitz's famous phrase suggests, “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. The very meaning of political activity only seems to make sense against the backdrop of a permanent state of war, articulated around the opposition of friend and foe.
23
Even if it does confuse us. Acceptance of transformation is a condition of hospitality, but also, more generally, of life.
24
See Carl Schmitt, Le nomos de la Terre, PUF, 2001.
25
“Agone” was the ancient Greek term for the art of regulated combat. For an in-depth look at its political meaning, see Sophie Gosselin et David gé Bartoli, La condition terrestre, habiter la Terre en communs, éd. Seuil, 2022, chap. 3.
26
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
27
See Qu’est-ce qu’une biorégion?, Mathias Rollot & Marin Schaffner, Wildproject, 2021.
28
See David gé Bartoli et Sophie Gosselin, Le toucher du monde – techniques du naturer, éd. Dehors, 2019.