Marisol de la Cadena Lecture "Uncommoning Nature: stories from the Antropo-not-seen"

Increasing consumption of minerals and energy has led to an unprecedented—and critical-- destruction of what we know as nature and natural resources  usually located in territories inhabited by indigenous groups.  The latter have responded politically to this destruction, frequently joining environmental political movements. Yet most intriguingly, these mobilizations have made public that nature and its resources are not only such: what is being destroyed is also other-than-human beings, crucial participants in worlds that do not abide by the ontological division between nature and humanity. I call this process “uncommoning nature”  a notion that I use to analyze what I see as the potential emergence of a radically different form of politics.