From the Archives: The Sarayaku people of Ecuador seek legal protection for Amazonian plants and animals. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s work on 'thinking forests' might help.
The Sarayaku territory in Ecuador is a 500-square-mile roadless jungle reachable only by helicopter, small aircraft, or a full day’s canoe trip on the Bobonaza River. For outsiders, opportunities to connect with this community of about 1,200 people are rare.
But the Sarayaku community also wanted a written document that would resonate across cultures, geography, and radically different perspectives. That’s why Santi had summoned Kohn, a professor at McGill University whose writings explore the connections between humans and other species. Working together in a small team that included other Sarayaku leaders, they quickly finalized the Declaration of Kawsak Sacha, a term that in Kichwa means “sentient forest.
“We have to put things in terms the judges can understand. At the same time, we want to change how they understand things,” Kohn says. “We’re trying to bring different kinds of worlds together to see that they’re actually part of the same thing. I think about anthropology as a kind of shamanism.”Ecuador is a second home for Kohn. It’s where his grandparents settled when they fled Europe to escape the Holocaust and where his parents grew up.
If Kohn had asserted that other creatures have feelings, it would be “a much easier position to take, because more people will agree with that,” Fuentes says. For example, scientists have made the case that elephants, ducks, and dogs may grieve. But thoughts? What does Kohn even mean by that? Twenty years ago, when Kohn was still a graduate student, he went to see the legendary anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz was known for “thick description,” the idea that anthropologists must gather a wealth of details to fully understand another culture’s practices. Kohn had recently returned from doing this kind of deep fieldwork in Ecuador, where he had lived for long stretches with the Runa people.
But Kohn refused to stop asking those questions. The result was his 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, in which he argues that all life-forms engage in thought. Through evolutionary dynamics, for example, plants, though lacking a recognizable brain, thrive, reproduce, and at times effectively outmaneuver other species.
But if Westerners begin to attribute thought, a higher-order function, to nonhuman life-forms, these beings may seem more valuable and worthy of protection. “If a forest is sentient, then it can’t exactly be understood as property, right?” Kohn says. “So, all sorts of things change.” Recently, Melo, who is the dean of the law school at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, received word that the Constitutional Court of Ecuador will soon hold its first hearing on the case. Melo’s team will ask the court to make Ecuador remove the explosives. But they will go further, calling on the court to realize the nation’s avowed ecological principles by granting rights to the Sarayaku forest itself.
The Sarayaku have long been among the leading voices in the rights of nature movement, Rodriguez-Garavito says. Two decades ago, when Westerners encountered this way of thinking, it “fell very much on deaf ears,” he adds, “because it sounded just ridiculous, right?” But “fast forward to 2020, and now we have [non-Indigenous] scientists making the same claims.” Ecologists are beginning to discover surprising interconnections, both among organisms and among far-flung ecosystems.
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