In 2009, Ecuador became the first nation ever to enshrine rights for nature in its constitution. Nature was accorded inalienable rights, and every citizen was granted standing to defend those rights. At the same time, the government advanced a policy of "extractive populism," buying public support for mineral mining by promising that funds from the mining would be used to increase public services.
This book, based on a nationwide survey and interviews about environmental attitudes among citizens as well as indigenous, environmental, government, academic, and civil society leaders in Ecuador, offers a theory about when and why individuals will speak for nature, particularly when economic interests are at stake. Parting from conventional social science arguments that political attitudes are determined by ethnicity or social class, the authors argue that environmental dispositions in developing countries are shaped by personal experiences of vulnerability to environmental degradation. Abstract appeals to identity politics, on the other hand, are less effective. Ultimately, this book argues that indigenous groups should be the stewards of nature, but that they must do so by appealing to the concrete, everyday vulnerabilities they face, rather than by turning to the more abstract appeals of ethnic-based movements.
Using the first national survey in Ecuador featuring an oversample of Amazon indigenous communities, this path-breaking book argues that how vulnerable or exposed people have been to environmental degradation determines how strongly they feel about saving the environment. Rather than emphasizing ethnic identity or stakeholders' ideological pre-dispositions towards environmentalism, the authors argue that on the front lines of environmental conservation, peoples'views are driven by personal experiences of vulnerability. Using the survey and hundreds of interviews across Ecuador over three years, the authors also argue that the creation of interest groups across ethnic and class lines is more effective in promoting environmental activism than more traditionalapproaches involving only ethnic or partisan affinity groups.
Eisenstadt and West have given voice to many indigenous people in Ecuador's Amazon region to convey their own views about the environmental degradation human rights lawyers have helped try to stop for decades. Drawing on meticulously gathered evidence and a well-reasoned approachWho Speaks for Nature?concludes that people care about the environment when it is integral and pristine; once the environment is destroyed people concern themselves with problems derived from this degradation, such as public health hazards, unemployment, and migration. This is a finding many of us have suspected but which has never to my knowledge been shown, until now.
