Module 2: How to understand ecological health
Featuring :
Dr Kavian Kulasabanathan
In this lesson Dr Kavian Kulasabanathan uses the example of the prison industrial complex to present a definition of abolition that we can apply to ecological health justice.
Key Learnings: Definitions
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PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment [as defined by Critical Resistance].
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Abolition Ecology is a lens to view the intersections of policing, surveillance and the prison industrial complex with capitalism extraction and exploitation destroying the planet’s ecosystems.
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Cuerpo Territorio is a method stemming from Indigenous conceptions of Latin American geography, which recognizes the centrality of situated and embodied experiences as a form of knowing. The concept of cuerpo territorio enables knowledges and conceptualisations of land and body similar to ecological health but outside of the Anglophile and Western paradigms.
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Trying to make change within the current system(s). Reform runs the risk of allowing the underlying causes of existing inequities to remain, even if addressed on the surface.
Key Learnings: Our Thoughts
What some centrists or liberals may call a “broken system” when it comes to industries such as health, education, and incarceration are actually working as intended with key features of extractivism and redistribution of many to few.
Reform is just trying to change the wrapper of a system without shifting the underlying mechanisms that produce inequities.
Core of abolition (as suggested by Kavian).
Abolitionists look to understand and are committed to dismantling the conditions that give rise to violence.
Non-punitive approach, meaning an approach rooted in care, not punishment.
Abolition is propositional about the world we want to see. How we are building our societies.
Abolitionists have a critical interrogation on the role of the state. If the state is committed to sacrifice zones and “acceptable” levels of air pollution for some, are they redeemable as a site for change.
Creating opportunities to study together then organise into practice together is vital for incorporating abolition as an intentional and informed practice for your community.
We must be ready to build from the ashes of failed experiments and pilots in change.
What in this lesson stood out for you?
Debate Questions
These questions are framed to help you apply your own experience and perspectives to points raised in this lesson.
How do Kavian’s core principles of abolition and non-punitive, rebuilding practices rooted in care align with your current approach to ecological health and justice?
Where do you see the role of the state (if at all) in your efforts to achieve ecological/environmental justice?
Can you identify local health justice strategies that, by proposing reform rather than rebuilding or radical infrastructure change, still uphold deeper mechanisms of inequity for people and place?
How To…
Orientate ecological health justice in care-based rebuilding
Declaring the limitations of reform
•Is your local authority or the environmental agency creating an illusion of change within artificially set conditions, e.g. investing in green spaces or planting more trees in the context of a power plant or development site being completed for profit? Identify the crumbs that are given in the name of environmental justice and question the givens.
Proposing care-based, intersectional and ecological strategies
•Considering advocacy strategies rooted in care could mean that instead of trading social and environmental change against each other in a context of scarcity and urgency, you instead strategise in the overlaps of ecological health justice. E.g contextualising the harm to the community’s health long term as a result of the introduction of an incineration site, rather than focusing solely on the jobs created, and strategising against economic precarity in your air pollution advocacy.
•Assess the needs of your community who may depend and feel secure in the proposed reforms from local government, are you organising in such a way that decreases dependency on reforms that maintain the status quo?
Starting to rebuild in this moment
•Assess the commitments of important local stakeholders that enable or limit your proposed rebuilding, care-based strategies.
•Build responsive relationships within your community.
Next Lesson:
Module 2 Lesson 3