POLITIK EKOLOGI KEHUTANAN: KEBIJAKAN HUTAN TANAMAN INDUSTRI DI SAMBELIA, LOMBOK TIMUR

Ecological politics rely solely on economic interest. Development and the environment have a complicated correlation. The industrial plantation forest policy aims to ensure that the economic benefit goes hand in hand with the sustainability demand. Ironically, this policy triggers a conflict between local communities and corporations as the holder of forest concession rights. The concession is practically established due to merely economic interest aligned with the extractive industry of tobacco in Lombok. The plantation is aimed as the supporting source for the tobacco industry since it requires specific woods to roast the tobacco. The study refers to utilizes instrumental state theory and deep ecology perspective to identify how the policy was made for the capital and tobacco capital benefits, while the sustainability objective is left behind. The study shows not only how the concession sparked ironic economic development, but also how the liberal environmentalism approach in industrial forest plantation policy has failed to gain its objective. The economic potential of tobacco in Lombok is the main determinant in industrial forest plantation policy that changes community forests into private forests. In the end, the policy was strategically implemented to sustain production and strengthen corporation monopoly over forests.

The nonhuman turn: Critical reflections on alienation, entanglement and nature under capitalism

This article critically reflects on contemporary discussions of human-nonhuman relations and their consequences for ecological politics. Recent critiques push back against popular ‘nonhuman turn’ appeals to ‘decentre’ humans and downplay distinctions between humans and nonhumans. The article seeks to both extend and nuance these critiques by emphasising how uneven developments from colonial to digital platform capitalism have intensified historical processes of alienation between humans and the rest of nature. This focus contextualises the nonhuman turn as a response to increasingly alienated forms of entanglement, which may hamper rather than enable challenging contemporary forms of domination. To address this, two conceptual shifts are proposed. First, a shift away from ‘decentring the human’ to a dialectics between more-than-human and ‘less-than-human’. This move emphasises how forms of capitalist domination continue to diminish (certain) humans and nonhumans and how challenging this requires pivoting between de- and recentring humans where needed. Second, a shift from ‘more-than-human’ to ‘more-than-life’, to emphasise how through extremely uneven histories of capitalist development the intensification of alienation has led to growing tensions between ontological relationality and epistemological and practical distinctions.

Flint Recycling in the Lower Paleolithic Levant: A Microscopic Investigation of Small Recycled Flakes at Qesem Cave (Israel)

Recycling is defined as a process in which waste materials can again become usable. In the common belief of many peoples, recycling is only considered a contemporary manifestation linked to the economic and ecological politics of industrialized societies. Both archaeological and historical records, however, prove that recycling has its roots back in time, being a common behavior of our ancestors as well as of many past societies. At the Late Lower Paleolithic site of Qesem Cave, Israel, research has identified a particular lithic trajectory oriented towards the production of small flakes by means of recycling, in the exploiting of old discarded flakes to be re-used as cores. The high density of this specific production throughout the stratigraphic sequence of the cave demonstrates that lithic recycling was a conscious and planned technological choice aimed at providing small and sharp items, most probably in order to meet specific functional behaviors. This particular lithic behavior persisted for some 200 kyr of human use of the cave and is not related to any shortage of flint, as the vicinity of the cave is exceptionally rich in flint sources. The exceptional conservation of use-wear signs and residues has allowed the author to reconstruct the functional role of this specific production, highlighting its specialized nature mostly related to the processing of animal carcasses through accurate and careful actions. The aptitude towards specialization in a tool’s function and technology shows how advanced the cognitive capacities were of the Qesem hominins. Applying functional analysis based on the determination of wear on artifacts by means of optical light microscopes, scanning electron microscopy and chemical analysis (FTIR and EDX) provides a useful and effective approach for understanding the adaptive strategies of the Qesem Cave hominins who, while facing various situations, were able to find thoughtful solutions for different needs.

WATER SECURITY IN ECOLOGICAL POLITICS DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC ERA

The major challenges related to water security today are efforts to reduce flood risk; and efforts to increase water supply for communities, industry and agriculture. The ecohydrological approach is present as a solution to these two challenges. On the other hand, the ecological problem with the issue of water security in it has developed over time and awaits real action by the government. In a political framework, ecological issues have been considered marginal and lacking in priority instead of being dominated by other fields, such as economy, law, and infrastructure. In fact, the government is to be committed to promoting eco-friendly development. In the current COVID-19 pandemic, leadership that cares about the environment as a manifestation of ecological politics is a necessity, and is expected to be present both substantially and factually. With the spirit of ecological leadership, strengthening the environmental sector will be on par with other sectors. Keywords: water security, eco-friendly development, ecological politics, ecological leadership.

Vietnamese and Chinese Movies about Royalty

Since 2002, with the enormously successful release of the movie Hero by Zhang Yimou, we have been witnessing the resurrection of the royal theme in contemporary East Asian cinema, and the return of Confucian cosmology as its philosophical foundation. In this paper, I focus on Vietnamese films which represent royal subjects and court life, like Heroes of the Tay Son Dynasty (Tây Sơn hào kiệt; Lý Hùng, Lý Huỳnh, and Phượng Hoàng; 2010), Blood Letter (Thiên mệnh anh hùng, Victor Vũ, 2012), and Tam Cam The Untold Story (Tấm Cám chuyện chưa kể, Ngô Thanh Vân, 2016); and Chinese films, like Hero (英雄, Zhang Yimou, 2002), The Banquet (夜宴, Feng Xiaogang, 2006), and Red Cliff (赤壁, John Woo, 2008). Firstly and most importantly, my essay examines how the cosmic and environmental elements in such movies are manipulated to advocate some particular political discourse as a kind of ecological politics. From this analysis, I analyse and explain the similarities in how the filmmakers in Vietnam and China establish the stereotypes of power and legitimacy of authority utilizing and transforming the Confucian spiritual cosmology. I also try to clarify the difference between the two cinemas in how they express the concepts “the Unity of Heaven and Man” (tianren heyi), “Rectification of Names” (zhengming), and “Virtue of Loving Life” (haosheng) in their political implications. Finally, I will discuss the layers of meaning and visual narratives by analysing the characters and social contexts of the films to reaffirm the varying degrees of influence of Confucian tradition on contemporary forms of cultural and political practices.

Humanism and the Hikari Event

This article tells the story of one reader’s search for an environmental humanities approach to the work of Ōe Kenzaburō. When the Fukushima Power Plant melted down in March 2011, Ōe had already been an antinuclear activist for almost fifty years. Yet the conviction that drove his opposition had always been humanist rather than environmental. Even after the disaster, he continued to address nuclear toxicity as a problem to be tackled with the power of language: the power to resist, to speak truth, to participate in democracy. But what if what Ōe has been saying for decades implicitly about his disabled son Hikari’s musical sensibility were more interesting for an ecological politics than what he repeated explicitly after the disaster? This article discusses the Hikari figure’s relation to music in two texts, both referenced by Ōe in his post–3.11 activism: a 1991 short story called “Hi o megurasu tori” 火をめぐらす鳥 (“Light Circling Bird”), and a 2009 novel called Suishi 水死 (Death by Water). I read these texts along with Isabelle Stengers’s 2009 ecomanifesto In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism to argue that the disabled musician offers powerful tools for environmental engagement.