Can we bring people and the planet back together?
This site aims to argue that people and nature can come back together and the divide can be mended. According to an argument Kröger presents, there are movements that may be able to reverse the negative impacts of monocultures and mend the divide between humans, nature, and themselves. He terms these movements anti-extractivist, highlighting how the movements actually can go against the extractivist ways. I hope to further his argument by diving deeper into some anti-exractivist and non-extractavist movements and lifestyles.
Methods
MST
Kroger highlights the MST land reform movement as one of the anti-extractivist movements. The MST movement is a land reform movement in Brazil where they fight for huge plots of land, mostly monocultures, some inactive, to be given back to people to use them properly. They use squatting techniques and agroecology to fight for land reform, and they are successful. By fighting for land reform in these ways, they bring back diversity in the plants and mend the divide between people and nature.
Indigenous Groups
Indigenous groups are also really crucial to the mending of the nature people divide because they have been resisting the divide from the start. They often live in and with nature rather than seeing nature as something else, not human. In Brazil, the Panará tribe has been going through many hardships due to extractivist activity (Kroger). They lived off the land, but when the land was altered, they had such trouble finding food to hunt or even water to drink when the streams were dry. The indigenous tribes are attempting to live with nature, but are enduring the pains of the human nature divide. They want to not cause harm to the land, and they are not. However, they are not bringing back any health to the land so they can not do anything to mend the situation.
Agroecology
Luckily there are ways of farming and living that can bring health back to the land. Agroecology, the process of bringing ecological knowledge and processes to environmental systems, may be one way. Agroecology is about the knowledge that the local farmers can use to improve their crops’ health and biodiversity without the need for harmful chemicals, extra resources, or monocultures. It is a way of life that can connect people to the land by encouraging more participation and connection to the land.
