Who Speaks for Nature?

Parting from conventional social science arguments that people speak for the ethnic groups they represent or for social or class-based groups, this study argues that attitudes of Ecuador’s Amazon citizens are shaped by environmental vulnerability, and specifically exposure to environmental degradation. Using results of a nationwide survey to demonstrate that vulnerability matters in determining environmental attitudes of respondents, the authors argue that groups might have more success mobilizing on behalf of the environment through geographically based “polycentric rights,” rather than through more traditional and ethnically bound multicultural rights. This book offers among the first methodological bridges between scholarship considering social movements, and predominantly ethnic groups, as primary agents of environmental change in Latin America and those emphasizing the agency of individuals. The authors conduct a nationwide survey to glean respondent positions on a range of environmental issues, then contextualize these findings through scores of in-depth interviews with indigenous, environmental, government, academic, and civil society leaders throughout Ecuador between 2014 and 2017. They find that some abstract issues—like indigenous worldviews—affect peoples’ attitudes, but that concrete experiences—such as that of living in areas of environmental degradation due to oil drilling—is a more important conditioner of environmental attitudes. The authors qualify post-materialism, an early theory of environmentalism, which argues that material well-being makes citizens more protective of the environment. The book concludes that post-materialism must be tempered by individual vulnerability, and that group activism is more successful where people have not yet been adversely impacted by environmental degradation such as oil spills and forest destruction.