Environmental Humanities South: Decolonizing Nature in Highland Asia

Abstract

We, a group of native scholars based in the Himalayan region, co-author this article to propose an environmental humanities South—concurrently as an Asia-specific interdisciplinary field and a planetary human–nature epistemology of the Global South inextricably entwined with that of the Global North. Framed in the broader field of planetary health, this article begins with a perspectival shift by reconceptualizing the Global South and the Global North as the Planetary South and the Planetary North for the purpose of laying the epistemological groundwork for two interconnected arguments and subsequent discussions. First, the Planetary South is not merely epistemological, but is at once geographically epistemological and epistemologically geographical. Our debates with the currently dominant epistemologies of the South open up a decolonial conversation with what we call the Australian School of the environmental humanities, the initial seed bank of our interdisciplinary environmental work in Asia’s Planetary South. These multilayered epistemological debates and conversations lead to the second argument that the South and the North relate to one another simultaneously in symbiotic and paradoxical terms. Through these two arguments, the article addresses the conundrum of what we call the “postcolonial continuation of the colonial environmentality” and attempts to interweave the meaningful return of the eroding Himalayan native knowledges of nature with modern scientific findings in a way that appreciates the livingness of the earth and is inclusive of nonwestern environmental worldviews.

1. Introduction

We co-author this article to initiate an environmental humanities South from the Himalayan borderlands of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and the Tibetan Plateau. As native scholars based in these nations of Asia’s Global South, most of us are collaboratively responsible for sowing the seeds of the environmental humanities from the epistemological Global North, which we now prefer to call the “environmental humanities North”, in our individual university campuses and regional policy worlds [1,2]. Collectively, we have published on Himalayan indigenous knowledges [3,4], multispecies relations [5,6], indigenous–Buddhist cosmologies [7], monsoonal landscapes [8,9,10], neo-colonialism in postcolonial societies [11], natural and human-induced floods [12], communal water commoning [13], the everyday sense of nature [14], storylining climes [15], and relational being [16]. Our interdisciplinary experiment over the last decade has yielded locally specific and planetarily relevant research outcomes accompanied by a spontaneously emerging, Global South-focused, indigenous approach to the interdisciplinary studies of the environment.

The emergence of our works coincides with what Dolly Jørgensen and Franklin Ginn refer to as the “New Time” [17], which calls for decolonizing the environmental humanities in order to “take difference and different inherited histories seriously” [18]. This call further advances the endeavor of the founders of the environmental humanities North over a decade ago, who pointed out “the importance of indigenous and local knowledges, as part of a radical reconfiguration of our understandings of the living world” [19]. At the same time, from our native reading angle, this decolonial call, coming from the postcolonial, epistemological West, is knotted in what Deborah Bird Rose foresaw as “the difficult space of simultaneous critique and action” [19]. In our eyes, the difficulty lies in its simultaneous self-critique of one’s colonial ancestors and self-restrained appreciation of indigenous ecological knowledges for the sake of preventing romanticization of indigenous wisdoms [18,20]. The former is a step away from the earlier rejection of “descendent guilt” [21] to acknowledge the epistemological “we” born and matured from the global colonial history of Europe. The latter is a precaution of preventing ecologically and culturally disconnected, self-fashioned fantasies of the Other. Both impress us as a self-reflection of the epistemological West, not fully open for broader conversations with those of us non-Western natives who do not share the same ancestral lores and colonial histories. We, however, receive the decolonial signal of the New Time as opportune timing for us to tell our own stories.

Jørgensen and Ginn’s call is undoubtedly compelling us to think aloud about what our environmental humanities South would look like when it emerges from our collaborative scholarly work and lived experiences in the greater Himalayan region. Situated in this collective future-building backdrop, we co-author this article to formalize this environmental humanities South as an interdisciplinary decolonial field of environmental studies to advance the research and teaching concerning the ecological, affective, and existential Earth–human mutualism as well as the decolonially recognized symbiotic relations of human societies in the Anthropocene. Open to the planetary participation of humanists of all colors and stripes, the decolonial endeavor of this environmental humanities South is aimed at what we call “decolonizing nature” in the highlands of Asia.

We begin with a perspectival shift from the global to the planetary by rephrasing the Global South and the Global North as the Planetary South and the Planetary North. This perspectival shift is meant to lay a new epistemological groundwork for two interconnected arguments and subsequent discussions. First, the Planetary South is not merely epistemological but is at once geographically epistemological and epistemologically geographical. Our debates with the currently-dominant epistemologies of the South open up a decolonial conversation with what we call the Australian School of the environmental humanities [19,22], the initial seed bank of our interdisciplinary environmental work in Asia’s Planetary South. These multilayered epistemological debates and conversations lead to the second argument that the South and the North relate to one another simultaneously in symbiotic and paradoxical terms. Through these two arguments, the article addresses the conundrum of what we call the “postcolonial continuation of the colonial environmentality” and attempts to interweave the meaningful return of the eroding Himalayan native knowledges of nature with modern scientific findings in a way that appreciates the livingness of the Earth and is inclusive of nonwestern environmental worldviews.

2. A Perspectival Shift from the Global to the Planetary

The proposed environmental humanities South does not at all signal the erection of another disciplinary or epistemological silo [23] to widen the artificial divide between the South and the North. Instead, the way we use the phrase “the South” in this article has a twofold intention working toward the future demise of this artificial dichotomy of humanity.

First, we intend to rephrase “the Global South” and the “Global North” respectively as “the Planetary South” and “the Planetary North” for the purpose of advancing “Whole Earth thinking” [24], “thinking-feeling with the Earth” [25], and “planetary thinking” [26]. It is because we see the word “globe” as too shallow to convey the cosmic history, the creative power, the geological depth, the ecospheric connectivity, and the diversity of life on Earth. The modern sense of the globe is commonly associated with the miniaturized Earth-image shaped in a ball with the world map spread out on the surface. It certainly offers us convenience to visualize the total human world geopolitically divided by regions and nations but conveys very little knowledge about the earth as a planet with an unimaginably long life of her own. By replacing “global” with “planetary”, we no longer see the South and the North merely as an artificially-designated pair of geopolitical opposites but feel in both, the planetarily rooted but wounded and divided humanity, crying out for healing, reconciliation, and renewed hopes for healthy and sustainable futures. Thinking-feeling with Planet Earth renews our diverse ancient human affective relations with and lived experiences of the Earth as the home of countless symbiotic lifeworlds. The life-history, the agency, and the moral considerability of the Earth are simply too important to be left out of human politics of the South and the North. Both the lifeworlds and the human epistemologies of the South and the North find their rhizomic roots deeply entangled in Planet Earth, a 4.5-billion-year-old celestial member of the Milky Way and the life-giver of all past, present, and future organisms. The globe has thus little depth to express the cosmic and biogeological ancientness of the indigenous Earth.

Second, the de facto but not yet fully acknowledged, multidimensional interconnectedness of the Planetary South and North obliges us to practice what Nalini Nadkarni calls the “tapestry thinking” meant for “weaving ideas and creating common threads” [23] and for solving “difficult problems with an interdisciplinary framing” [27]. The tapestry thinking not merely lends strengths to our ongoing “lively ecologies of meaning and value, entangled within rich patterns of cultural and historical diversity that shape who we are and the ways in which we are able to ‘become with’ others”, as the founding members of the environmental humanities North put it [19]. It also helps us situate our locally-practiced lively ecologies in the greater intentional community around the world endeavoring to restore and sustain the planetary health of land, air, water, and life communities of humans and nonhumans. We thus intend to frame our environmental humanist endeavor in the broadest sense of planetary health, “an overarching framework for integrating the many diverse but inherently connected aspects of the biophysical, social, cultural, and economic challenges regarding global flourishing” [28].

To caution ourselves, the said replacement of “the global” with the “planetary” does not suggest that we circumvent the actual social and environmental challenges produced by the anthropogenic forces of the South–North geopolitics. Neither is it intended to ignore the ongoing South–North epistemological politics. Instead, it urges us to see the challenges as the outcomes from the more-than-human forces of change. In other words, the earth’s own tapestry-weaving process in geological, ecological, biological, and climatic terms are inherently symbiotic with the adaptive politics in human and nonhuman worlds. Both environmental peace and violence come with it to shape or disintegrate the habitability of human and nonhuman ecological worlds. While gearing toward the aspired holistic future of a planetary environmental humanities, the present state of human affairs requires us to engage mindfully with regionally and locally experienced challenges in the Planetary South from injustice, inequality, poverty, and unevenly shared wealth resulting from what is known as the “resource curse” [29,30]. At the same time, we are fully aware that both the contemporary South and the North are not monolithic and mutually exclusive silos. On the environmental front, both have epistemic communities that hold common restorative and sustainable goals with diverse approaches.

3. A Southern Epistemological Outlook

The Planetary South in which we live and work is at once an international borderland and a contact zone of multiple Asias—Central Asia, East Asia, Inner Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—shaped by tectonic forces, closely-knit microclimatic ecosystems, numerous ethnolinguistic groups, historical Eurasian imperial encounters, and the ongoing intersection of indigenous and exogenous environmental knowledges. It is a world of many in one and one in many. The “many” is self-evident in both Himalaya-nourished human diversity and biodiversity. Its human pluriverse is reflected in the co-authors’ ethnic and national origins respectively as an Adi, an Assamese, a Bengali, an Erma-Chinese, an Idu Mishmi, a Han-Chinese, a Lepcha, a Newar-Nepali, a Nepali, a Pakistani, a Pallar, a Sharchop, and a Vietnamese-Nepali. Among us, we have an NGO leader, a conservationist, a regenerative farmer, an award-winning poet-novelist, and a documentary filmmaker. Our academic backgrounds are found in anthropology, biology, earth science, environmental science/studies, history, literature, and sociology.

Aside from human diversity, the Himalayan highlands stand as a powerful symbol of our South’s geo-ecological “oneness”. Sculpted by fifty million years of the planet’s tectonic forces, this geological spine threads together bordered human nations and the sources of frozen and flowing water keeping nearly two billion people alive [31]. From mighty rivers to hidden glaciers, every drop sustains not only human life but also a vibrant tapestry of plants and animals. To be informative of what the South means in our Asian context naturally becomes critical before we lay out what the decolonization of nature entails in our Southern environmental humanities in the making.

The current trend of the Planetary (Global) South studies tells us that the South is more epistemological than geographical [32], but our own sense of it is both epistemologically geographical and geographically epistemological, meaning that geography and epistemology are so entwined that one cannot speak of one without the other. To be specific, we see the histories of the colonized native peoples in South America and Africa as the geographical basis of the current epistemologies of the South that are largely conceived in the Planetary (Global) North inclusive of both Europe and what Alfred Crosby calls the “neo-Europes” [33]—the European settler societies in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Whether native to the South or the North, many influential epistemologists of the South are based epistemologically and/or geographically in the North [25,34,35]. It is not an overstatement that the epistemologies of the South are largely a case of Northern theories thriving on Southern stories.

Make no mistake, the currently widely-read, high-impact epistemological works, written either on the South’s behalf or from the South but published in the North, are aware of the active twenty-first century consequences of the past European colonialism. We would like to reiterate the historical fact that the colonizing European nations, on a continental scale, transformed South America into a multitude of settler societies and Africa into numerous colonies and subsequent postcolonial nation-states. It is inevitable that the two continents have thus become the numerically dominant hotspots of the Southern epistemologies born from decolonial struggles [34]. Their geographically specific experiences integrally shape the currently trending themes of the epistemological debates on the meanings of coloniality, decoloniality, postcoloniality, and neo-coloniality.

Without exception, our co-authorship is environed in the planetary sphere of the Southern epistemologies that are geographically and epistemologically traceable to South American and African stories. While our colonial histories in Asia resonate with past traumatic experiences, our historically and ecologically rooted environmental sensibility compels us to speak of our own pluriverse when the entire Planetary South seems to be represented uniformly by some of the leading epistemologists who claim, “We are the Global South”, “We are all indigenous peoples because we are where we have always been”, “We are the dispossessed of the Earth because we are considered ignorant, inferior, local, particular, backward, unproductive, or lazy”, and “the Global South represents the world of subalterns” [34]. Endeavoring to right the colonial wrongs persisting to this day, the current epistemologies of the South are discernibly “vast political landscapes of emancipation” and “a time of epistemological imagination aimed at refounding the political imagination” [36].

When we emplace the currently dominant Southern epistemologies in the ethnocultural contexts of the Asian borderlands, we see that a contrastive, multifaceted geography, past and present, surfaces: our ancestral lands were not all conquered by Europeans; no former European colonies in the Himalayan region have become settler societies; being indigenous is not delineated solely against the exogeneity of Europeans but is rhizomatically entangled with locally, regionally, and globally numerous historical and modern patterns, conditions, and changes. These regional dynamics entail, but are not limited to, diversely interconnected ecosystems, shared ethnolinguistic roots, customary interstate marriage alliances, trade relations, the spread of world religions, climate- or war-induced migrations, premodern imperial conquests of our larger neighbors, modern European colonial expansion, our current nation-states’ modernization drives, and age-old indigenous kinship ties severed by unilaterally, bilaterally, and/or multilaterally partitioned national physical borders. The list is exhaustively long.

It is factual that no longer do Europeans or their descendants rule our politically-defined postcolonial worlds in Asia but the racial and moral assumptions made of us as backward natives remain reflexively present in the epistemological sphere and the cultural unconscious of the West. While our postcolonial sovereignties tell us that we are the political equals of Europeans and neo-Europeans, the remnants of colonially tinted, systemic but reflexively enacted inequality seep into our professional interactions with our Northern colleagues. From time to time, we experience our token role as a “significant Other” in the workshops, conferences, and speaking events organized by our Northern colleagues. While we undoubtedly feel the genuinely appreciated significance of our “otherness” in the academic world, we sense its statistical significance, too, to the hosting Northern institutions seeking to improve their performance metrics of global outreach and inclusiveness. On a personal basis, many of our Northern colleagues are our long-time friends who are not aware of the tokenism they reflexively perform on us. This reflexiveness convinces us that this tokenism is a long-standing, often systemic, practice of privileged Northern institutions that, lacking diversity themselves, then resort to the performance of a token diversity.

While resonating with the political and racial debates of the current epistemologists of the South, we see many other ways to address ethnocultural (in)equality without locking ourselves into the predetermined dichotomization of “the West and the Rest”, in which we always find ourselves as the nameless, dehumanized Rest. After all, the dichotomized way of making sense of the world is in itself a colonial way of thinking, such that one is unable to visualize and experience the myriad entanglements—a mesh of threads, really, woven together haphazardly—that the world is otherwise imagined to be in narratives of the South. And we see no hope if we are stuck in the rut of colonial hangovers in our politically postcolonial societies. With this said, unlike those leading epistemologists, we do not wish to reiterate the colonial, hurtful debasement of us that is generally deployed as the critical basis of our Southern epistemologies. The aforementioned representation of the entire South as ignorant, inferior, and subaltern is an epistemological fabrication of the colonial North. If we had to make a self-representational statement, we would prefer to end this deforming, false consciousness by stating: “We are beautiful, wise, knowledgeable, resourceful, and creative in our worlds”!

At the same time, we find little holistic space for our environmental humanism in politically oriented representational discourses because they leave out details that shape our pluriverse consisting of more-than-human dwelling places, diverse life experiences, and horizontal human relations interwoven by land, air, water, plants, animals, and, sometimes, by shared supernatural spirits and deities. The complexity of our pluriverse, like any other on Earth, is not limited to its political existence.

Furthermore, the dense entanglement of Asia’s Planetary South with the Planetary North foremost demands that our environmental humanities South in the making practice an art of epistemological discourse premised upon a recognition of the artificiality of the South–North polarization and of the North’s multifaceted embodiment of the South and vice versa. In our understanding, the current epistemological positing of the opposing South and North rather reflects what Anna Tsing calls the “dilemmas of collaborative survival” and “contaminated diversity” in the Anthropocene, in which “We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others” [37]. The North’s aggressively expressed heavy dependency on the resources of the South since the colonial era has created modern, affluent, democratic Northern nations that are physically embodied with the processed natural resources and the sweat and blood of human and nonhuman labor from Southern nations [38]. Meanwhile, the independent nation-states of the postcolonial South have translated and oftentimes advanced the same colonial extractive development ideology and practice into their nation-building processes in an aim to be the political and economic equals of their Northern counterparts. Post-colonial nation-states, such as in the case of India being ruled by the dominant population, are propagating majoritarianism leading to the continuance of erstwhile colonial politics and policies. The living practices and traditional knowledges of minority societies (indigenous and non-indigenous) show a world of many worlds being marginalized and slowly losing their public relevance [11].

Needless to say, it is ironic that the presence of the colonial epistemological North is readily found among the Southern nation-states whose extractive capacities likely exceed those of the Northern colonists of the past. Looking at this contaminated entanglement of the South and the North, we are convinced that an active decolonization of nature worldwide is the first step toward true postcolonial environmental freedom.

Our Southern epistemological outlook, therefore, recognizes the densely intertwined Planetary South and North manifest in multiple unequal geopolitical and economic relations, the inextricable resource-dependency of the North on the South, and the Southern nations’ rigorous GDP-based growth modeled on the economic development process of the colonial and postcolonial North. The current South–North interpenetration and embodiment of one another are a planetary reality. The diverse environmental value-orientations among the individual and institutional members of the epistemological South and North do not permit us to embrace a South only as a recipient of the North’s environmental violence. Neither do they warrant a contemporary North lacking in conscience for the planetary wellbeing because, in truth, environmentally-caring and justice-conscious Northerners are countlessly diverse. In this planetary backdrop, the South in our proposed environmental humanities is a South understood from the worldwide colonial history as well as a regional South that is concurrently subjected to the extractive use of natural resources, yet holds a variety of traditional ecological knowledges of nature. The latter are invaluable for the current planetary endeavors for building sustainable futures and for the advancement of humanities-based environmental studies.

4. Nature-Epistemics South in Environmental Humanities North

We have taken to heart the core messages from the Australian School of the environmental humanities: “to resituate the human within the environment and to resituate nonhumans within cultural and ethical domains” [19], to celebrate “the interconnections of life” [39], to cultivate “arts of attentiveness” [23], to tell “more-than-human histories” [40], and “to counteract ethical hyperseparation [of human and nature]” [41]. Our indebtedness to the late Deborah Bird Rose in particular is no less than her close friends’ eulogy of her life as a most original thinker and inspiring founder of the environmental humanities [42]. Reading through many of her single- and co-authored texts, we feel a powerful resonance of the aboriginal environmental worldview with those of our Himalayan worlds. Rose was both a witness and a channeler of the aboriginal lived experiences of Country. Synonymous with nature, Country offers no abstract perceptions but embodies the concrete personhood of Planet Earth as “a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life” [39]. From Rose’s writings, we hear the voice of Country in the ravaged aboriginal lands and in the wounded psyches of their human and nonhuman residents. Her accounts of Country in the settler North have become an epistemic space where wounded nature and her more-than-human aboriginal life communities tell their stories of the agelessly sentient Earth, colonial consequences, collective traumas, and hopes for justice and healing.

Placing it in the epistemologies of the South, we see the Rose-inspired Australian School as an intertwined epistemic world of an aboriginal South and a decolonial North. The former invites us into the living world of aboriginal people. The latter demonstrates the School’s attentive role in decolonizing the colonial epistemology of the settler society and also points to the epistemically diversifying North in the environmental arena. Inspired by the indigenous South, the North is currently witnessing a lively return of Europe’s own indigenous knowledges niched within the fields of new animism and neopaganism [43], intended to find new meanings from old traditions. Overall, this growing niche remains marginal in the environmental studies of the North, in which nature is often discerned as “a particularly powerful fiction” suggesting a series of abstract representations in the epistemic communities of experts [44]. If we situate Rose’s restorying of Aboriginal Country in the unending maze of the scientifically-motivated representations in the North, it is likely to be treated as a conceptual representation only. To us, Rose’s work concretely offers “a poetic key” to “life in its variety, particularity, and fecundity” [45]. It allows us to see how nature in her active voice ecologically and spiritually communicates her maternal principle, agency, and subjectivity with indigenous Australians. Rose’s environmental humanism achieved Plumwood’s lifetime struggle against the hyperseparation of nature and human [41].

From our Southern perspective, what needs to be said is that the Australian School is recognizably nourished by the aboriginal South but is nevertheless an interdisciplinary field native to and serving the Northern social sciences and humanities. In it, the Northern environmental humanism and the Southern indigenous knowledge are being interbraided to revitalize environmental studies in the North [19]. Our epistemological impression of the Northernness of the School comes from its founding members’ transparently positioned humanist subjectivity. It is expressed as a self-critical and decolonial “we”: “we hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domination” [41], “we’re still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and ‘dead’ nature that justifies both colonial conquests and commodity economies” [46], “we colonisers and settlers, the conquerors of new worlds, are paradoxically situated”, “we bear the burden of the violent history of conquest”, “we shake our capacity for connection loose from the bondage of monologue” [21], “we come to animism via our own worldly encounters, read through the refractive lenses of Western science and philosophy” [22], and “my views lie within the mainstream of Western animistic Paganism” [47].

It is discernable that the decoloniality of the Australia School is firmly anchored to Northern environmental philosophies and ethical traditions, such as the abovementioned pagan animism brought back to life through “the refractive lenses of Western science and philosophy” [22,48]. This gives us Asian environmental humanists much food for thought in terms of where we epistemologically stand as we have our different ethnocultural roots, philosophical–spiritual traditions, ethical systems, and regional, national, and communal environmental dilemmas aside from our historical encounters with European colonial expansion. This is where we have begun to speak of the Southernness of our environmental humanism.

5. Environmentality of the North in Asia’s South

The postcolonial presence of colonial environmentality is prevalent in the individual nations of Highland Asia. By “environmentality” we mean the state-initiated interlinkage of power, knowledge, and institutions to create new environmental subjects [49,50]. While European colonialism is long gone in the Asian worlds, its governmentality of the environment is alive in the postcolonial extractive industrialism implemented in service of the modernization agendas of our nations, each of which is aiming to be as “advanced” as modern Europe. So, too, has this governmentality proliferated into those nations and ethnic groups that were not colonized by Europeans. Such postcolonial celebration of colonial industrialism has promoted principles of a human–nature separation that has been the basis of sustaining the outdated modern–savage binary. For example, it condones the postcolonial oppression of Dalits as untouchables in India [51] and reinforces the epistemic framing of ethnic minorities as backward in China [52]. The Himalayan borderlands are the homes of many diverse peoples who are systemically treated as national minorities in their respective modern nation-states. Under such environmentality, the wealth of nature in their ancestral lands bring the “resource curse” [30] rather than prosperity, as local extraction is meant to cater to regional and global consumption.

Take hydraulic development among the Himalayan nations for example. China, India, Bhutan, and Nepal are actively harnessing hydroelectric energy by building modern dams. Bhutan recently achieved its hydraulic goal of producing 1000 MW, seventy-five percent of which is exported to India, while Bhutan still has not been able to provide one hundred percent of its urban and rural areas’ energy needs. The largest dam under construction in Bhutan is the 1200 MW Punatsangchhu-I Hydroelectric project. Fully funded by forty percent grant and sixty percent loan from India, it is planned to export all of its surplus power to India [53]. In a similar situation, Nepal has an export-oriented hydroelectric development path, too. In 2020, more than two hundred hydropower projects were under construction. These projects are intended to increase Nepal’s hydroelectric capacity from 1130 MW to 7949 MW [54]. A large percentage of this projected output is likely to be exported to India and China, with the latter having increased its investment in Nepal’s hydropower projects. Competitively drawing available hydro-energy from their neighboring countries in the Himalaya, the examples posed by the two fastest-growing economies of Asia invite more elaborate epistemological discussions.

Postcolonial India and China share the longest, most ethnically and biologically diverse borderlands in the Himalayan region. When the newly independent India in 1947 successfully ended British rule with Gandhi-inspired nonviolent struggle, it inherited British India’s extractive economic infrastructure, degraded environments, and heavily exploited, malnourished human communities throughout the subcontinent. The question of how to build a new, democratic, and flourishing India compelled Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, to make a difficult choice between a Gandhi-suggested self-reliant, subsistence-based national economy and a modern economy comparable to its Western counterparts. Nehru chose the latter, prioritizing the ability to feed and shelter 360 million Indians and to modernize India as a globally respected, strong nation.

Similar to the British environmental outlook of the Himalayas but with goals to lift millions of his compatriots from poverty and malnourishment, Nehru regarded the rivers flowing from the Himalayan–Tibetan highlands as “material wealth” for building the new India [55]. He eulogized modern dams as the “temples of modern India” [56] and “the symbol of India’s progress” [57]. Nehru set the course of India’s modernization ever since. His dam-building legacy continues to be celebrated as “the Green and White revolutions” that “brought food to the plates of countless Indians” and “made our Country secure, strong and confident” [58]. The “Green” and the “White” respectively signify crops and water management for flood prevention, irrigation distribution, and electricity availability in the newly independent India stricken with colonialism-induced hunger and famine [59]. As of 2022, India has 5334 large dams completed and 411 under construction [60]. At the same time, the local environmental and human costs of building dams and embankments are high. For example, postcolonial India continues to build colonial-style state-encouraged water-tight embankments in flood-prone areas in an attempt to separate “fertile land” from water, without consulting the local communities who have traditionally celebrated principles of the non-separation of water and land [61]. For these communities, annual floods are beneficial for the soil, while they also bring in new varieties of fish. The building of such “bunds” by neocolonial states in postcolonial nations has caused increasingly violent floods and erosion, causing local communities to experience frequent and disruptive migrations [11].

Comparable to but significantly exceeding India’s hydraulic accomplishments, China currently has nearly one hundred thousand dams, comprising forty percent of all large dams around the world [62]. All major hydraulic power stations are built on the rivers sourced from the Tibetan Plateau, such as the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Lancang River (Mekong). Similar to India’s historical economic development context, the newly founded People’s Republic of China, in 1949, was a nation of four hundred million people, recovering from a century of semi-colonialism, wars, and famines [63]. Unlike Nehru, Mao Zedong, the founder of the PRC, called for China to economically and technologically outcompete the UK and the US [64]. Dam-building is part and parcel of China’s ongoing hydroelectric development catering to its energy-intensive economic globalization. While the PRC has been in the forefront of fighting the domination of the West, it nevertheless faithfully regards the West as the source of modern progress, via science and technology. Unlike Nehru’s temple metaphor, dams in China are the physical statements of the human conquest of nature. Nature in this case is not an abstract concept but consists of physical environments that are the ancestral lands of native peoples and the habitats of indigenous plants and animals. Similar to the Indian case, human and environmental costs are high, too, but manifest mostly in the large-scale, often government-sanctioned relocation of human communities native to the riparian environments, as well as in endangerment and extinction of nonhuman species.

In both cases of India and China, nature has been subjected to a new round of human extractive activities for the sake of their “national modernization”, just as it has for their European counterparts. This era of industrial extractivism was not entirely new, but began as “old wine in new bottles”, or colonial extractive consciousness and practices in postcolonial “clothing”. Bordering on the Himalayan region, the national elites of the two most populous states played a significant role in making the new garments to clothe the modern colonial practices. In the Indian case, the native political elites and former functionaries in the colonial system fulfilled this colonial–postcolonial transition [65,66,67]. Although China was not fully colonized by European powers, its national elites in the late Qing and early Republic eras were enchanted by industrialization-based, modern Western science and revered it as the “savior” of the externally exploited and internally corrupted nation [68,69]. This enchantment has been an integral part of its nation-building and -strengthening to this day.

Both the Chinese and Indian states are now celebrating their achievements respectively as the world’s second and the sixth largest economies, though those rankings come at a steep environmental cost. Within the geographical sovereignties of the two largest Asian nations, nature has been dammed, mined, and deforested to fulfill human/national dreams. Nature is recolonized—this time not by foreign invaders, but by the native states holding the same industrial mindset as the past colonizers from afar. In this context, colonization of nature refers to a series of national industrial activities that are economically creative and environmentally destructive. While both nations have their varieties of state-sanctioned environmental programs, the domestic colonization of nature sparks public debates on the ethics and environmental impacts of economic growth fueled by the unsustainable extraction of resources from the Earth.

6. Decolonizing Nature in Highland Asia

Politically, decolonizing a postcolonial nation is redundant; however, environmentally, it makes every sense because regaining political liberation from colonial rule does not automatically come with environmental freedom from colonial environmental consciousness and practice. These conditions are often fully inherited by our politically independent, postcolonial nation-states and transformed into national modernization processes. Environmental coloniality thus slips into political postcoloniality with new faces, new teleologies, new assignments, and new effects. In the absence of European colonizers, the postcolonial environmentality shown in humans’ extractive relations with nature is identical to its colonial counterpart in the past. As aforementioned, countries that have never been fully colonized by Europeans, such as Bhutan, China, and Nepal, are not immune from the same environmental coloniality when it comes down to the conquest of nature in the name of their national modernization projects. Political postcoloniality thus harbors colonial extractive environmentality, which continues to generate ecological imbalance and unsustainable environments in Asia. This is where our environmental humanities South initiates decolonization of nature in epistemological, self-critical, and publicly engaged manners.

Conceived in the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, the modern Western scientific idea of nature currently dominates the planetary environmental consciousness. Translated into different languages, it has become one of the most frequent soundbites around the world. The utterance of the word “nature” often evokes images of nonhuman lifeworlds, reflexively suggesting nature’s separation from humans. Without exception, this word and its meaning came to Asia through Europe’s colonial epistemic infrastructure and has taken roots in our native lexicons and environmental mindscapes. In other words, it has been indigenized in Asia and, thus, presents itself as the dominant concept offering explanations of the dichotomized relations of nature and modern humankind. Thus, the objectification of nature has admittedly become rooted in social consciousness and, therefore, reflexive in most parts of modern Asia. Does this mean our decolonial initiative is a futile intent? Not at all!

As stated previously, our approach is not to deepen the human–nature, North–South, and West–Rest rifts in the name of postcolonial critique by positioning ourselves on the already-polarized sides of nature, the South, and the Rest as historical victims of colonialism; instead, we painstakingly revisit the historical and ethnolinguistic conjunctures revealing how our native societies and languages have hosted and indigenized Western notions of nature and the environment. The purpose is to bring our native knowledges of the Earth to the forefront of the planetary environmental discourse because they are currently confined in what is described as “indigenous/traditional knowledge” in the Northern academic world, as if they were the presence of the past. It is thus essential for us to revisit how the Western concept has found a way into our native lexicons and current environmental consciousnesses, and to identify the inclusive outcomes from environmental studies in the Planetary North, with which our native knowledges can be meaningfully conversant and find synergies to address the pressing environmental issues of our time and to co-build planetary ethics accordingly.

We cannot speak for other parts of Asia but each of the authors can tell the reader that some of our native languages have pre-existing words to host the Western concept of nature, while others do not. The former are associated with languages originating from and/or part of larger civilizations, such as the Hindu and the Chinese civilizations, based in the floodplains of the mighty rivers from the Himalayan–Tibetan highlands. Take the Sanskrit-based word prakriti in the Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, and Nepalese languages, for example. The word is designated as the translation of the Western notion of nature based on its native use for the physical world on the one hand and the inherent characteristic of a living being or a phenomenon on the other. However, these language-worlds had to coin new words to accommodate the “environment”, another Western concept referring to physical worlds surrounding human settlements. The examples are paryaavaran in Hindi (pari, surrounding; avaran, things surrounding humans and nonhumans) and vātaāvaraṇa in Nepali (vāta, air; āvaraṇa, covering). As both the Hindi and Nepalese words are Sanskrit-based, the nuance in each of them reflects a subtle difference in emphasis, with paryaavaran encompassing the broader physical surroundings and vātaāvaraṇa highlighting the aerial aspects of the environment. Both of them have nevertheless become the home away from home of the Western concept.

In contrast, smaller-scale societies often do not have indigenous equivalents for the concepts of nature and the environment as conveyed from the West; therefore, making new words or expanding the semantics of existing native words became a solution. Take for example the languages of the Idu Mishmi and the Lepcha in the eastern Himalayas. The Idu Mishmi native lexicon does not have words to match the Western counterparts designating the physical worlds outside or surrounding human societies. This is because the Idu Mishmi’s cosmologically conceived lifeworld is inclusively multispecies and multidimensional, combining the human world, the undomesticated nonhuman world, the spiritual world, and the netherworld [3,70]. The first two are physical worlds while the latter two are unseen-but-felt worlds that require shamanic guidance to access. When the modern concepts of nature and the environment are placed into the indigenous cosmology, they are compatible only to the nonhuman world composed of animals, plants, and mountain- and water-bodies. In comparison, the Lepcha absorbed the modern meanings of nature and the environment respectively into the existing native words ayit a-de and vartoa. Etymologically, ayit means “to create”. Together with ade, ayit a-de connotes the creation of a custom or life. Similar to the Idu Mishmi culture, the Lepcha native sense of nature also encompasses seen and unseen worlds in which the unseen worlds animate the seen worlds [4].

It becomes obvious that the Western notions of nature and the environment do not convey the invisible aspects of the visible worlds of the Himalayas because consideration of the spiritual dimensions of nature is absent in them. From our native perspective, externally perceived nature and environment, in the modern sense, are, in fact, an inherent part of the wholeness of human and nonhuman worlds. To reiterate, the nonhumans in our mountainous worlds also include spirits and deities who take the shapes, colors, and movements of meteorological flows, water bodies, and landforms. They are the animating forces expressing the livingness of the earth, which gives, takes, and transforms life in both animistic and biological senses.

In our cultures, nature, manifest in concrete landforms, water-bodies, and multispecies worlds, is simultaneously animistic, deified, and humanized. For instance, for the Adi, the Earth is a being just like us humans. She nourishes us with food, rice, water, and salt. We live the weathers and the seasons she makes. When we have wars killing each other, she receives the death into her bosom. She kills us, too, with a drowning river or an avalanche of rocks. It is a bond both cruel and kind, like brothers claiming territory. Each is equal to the other. It is a state of kinship in which we are bound to the Earth. The trance of a shaman (miri) helps us communicate with the land and listen to her language of evolution and transformation. This human-Earth kinship gives us a lived understanding that there will be neither subjugation nor surrender, but continued mutual embodiment.

As a part of our decolonial endeavors, the native understandings of the animatedness of the Earth in the greater Himalayan region compel us to turn “nature” and “environment” into action-packed verbs and gerunds—naturing and environing—in order to recognize the lively, pervasive agencies of nature and particular environments. In other words, climates, weather events, soils, microorganisms, humans, animals, and plants are symbiotically naturing with each other. Every/body/thing embodies and environs each other with the same creative force of Planet Earth. In comparison, the deep indigeneity of the incessantly-naturing planet pales human shallow indigeneity in its variety. This is where indigenous peoples around the world, including many of us, honor the planet as Mother Earth, a living system that interconnects everything [71]. This is also where many Earth scientists metaphorize the self-regulatory geophysiology of Planet Earth as the Greek earth goddess Gaia [72,73].

By perceptually transforming the substantive definitions of nature and the environment into action-packed expressions and events in actual physical worlds, we see that naturing and environing open up more experiential and cognitive spaces for us to convey our culturally and ecologically specific understandings of the Earth as the union of material and spiritual existences. In this respect, nature, objectified by modern science, cannot possibly be separated from humans. Aside from her own eco-biological and geophysiological activities, nature, understood in the sense of naturing, enters our bodies as breath and nourishment, moves in our blood, and ensouls the inner worlds of our beliefs and values. Our daily life pulsates with the animate land, water, and air.

Thus, our decolonial endeavors are oriented toward concurrently tracing how colonial environmentality has streamed into the postcolonial environmental consciousness, and appraising the ethical value of our ancient traditions of revering the animatedness of nature and recognizing the moral considerability of the earth. For the latter, we will continue to tell our native stories of how nature is naturing with humans and how humans are naturing with nature—as her dependent but reciprocal caretakers—and to co-witness with our peers around the world how the anthropocenically conditioned nature, as a life of her own, acts and speaks through the languages of climate change, environmental crisis, natural disasters, and human struggles for survival and flourishing futures.

7. Environmental Humanities South Not as an Environmentalism of the Poor

Our environmental humanities South in the making is not entirely an environmentalism of the poor, which predominantly weighs on the economically dispossessed South and its political resistance to the dispossessing forces of the Northern environmentality [74,75]. To us, this unique environmentalism is, first of all, a necessary political struggle for human justice and fair distribution of resources; however, in that telling, nature remains a passive resource entity to be contended with, harnessed, redistributed, and consumed [76]. Sadly, the sustainable fate of nature is not necessarily on the side of the postcolonial poor. Modern China and India are two pertinent examples of the concurrent political success of the poor’s struggle to reclaim their nations’ natural resources, and the failure of environmental justice movements to assure the health of nature as the foundation of human survival and flourishing. Apparently, nature has little active voice in the political struggle as all sides compete for resources, not to mention that there is little room for local traditional understandings of her moral considerability as a living system.

Secondly, being poor in Asia’s South is primarily measured by the globally prescribed metrics of GDP and household income [77]. Such metrics leave out the fact that, to start with, many societies in Asia’s Planetary South are naturally wealthy with an abundance of minerals, forests, and/or hydraulic potentials. Yet, people remain economically poor and environmentally endangered because nature’s limited, ecologically specific provisions to our ancestral lands now bear externally imposed responsibilities for the growth of both national and global economies. Apparently, the scientific understanding of environmental carrying capacity does not seem to be of concern in our worlds. The poverty of the South, in this case, is inverse to its natural wealth as well as to the local human wealth of knowledge for locally sustainable living. The externally defined poverty reflects the poverty of the holistic awareness of nature’s geo-ecological integrity in the prevailing extractive environmentality of the North now manifest in the postcolonial South as well.

Furthermore, neither is our environmental humanities South merely a political talking-back at the North [78] in which we accept ourselves as inferior but rebellious Southerners. The Fanonian style of political decolonization [34] no longer speaks to our shared national complexity of the postcolonial continuation of colonial environmentality. We tackle injustice but do not compromise our basic human dignity with the uncontextualized, generalized, carefree use of the decolonially justified vocabularies, such as “primitive”, “backward”, and “subaltern”. Instead, the gravity of our decolonial intent is found in the continuation of our storying the health of nature as the wealth of human and nonhuman beings in our highland pluriverse. We thus conscientiously prevent our environmental humanities South from becoming a new paradox of environmentalism [79], through which we merely speak of our Southern victimhood in the milieu of North-dominated environmental studies and public discourses while the planetary relevance of our traditional knowledges of environmental ethics and sustainable living remain marginal and/or epistemologically incarcerated in North-delimited indigenous studies [80].

8. Conclusions

In sum, the environmental humanities South we are commencing entails two concurrent actions. First of all, the political weight of the artificially divided South and North compels us to rethink how we position our ecologically oriented decolonial intent. Without doubt, we answer the calls from peer Southerners around the world for “the epistemological decolonization of the Global South” [81], “decolonizing the mind” [82,83], and “an active will to community” [84]. At the same time, we do not take literally the etymologically embedded meaning of severance or removal implied in the prefix “de-” in order to prevent ourselves from further fossilizing the artificial split of the whole of humanity into the South and the North. Instead, we examine the converging environmental meanings of the postcolonial South and the North shown in culturally inclusive and geo-ecologically holistic research findings and subsequently fresh environmental worldviews that are transcending the South–North divide for the sake of humanity’s ecospheric and ethical whole (some)ness [85]. To do so, we promote contextualized, locally specific understandings of what ecologically and geologically experienced nature or the Earth’s biosphere means in the Asian highlands.

This leads to the concurrent action of our existing, but to be expanded, studies of nature’s affective, animistic, and spiritual relations with diverse human societies in the greater Himalayan region. As aforementioned, our focus is on nature as a living system generative of naturing and environing activities with humans and nonhumans. The words “spiritual” and “affective” do not suggest the cuddliness of nature, as it is commonsense that nature takes, receives, and transforms life. Instead, they are used to address human–Earth relations interwoven with nature’s invisible forces and visible manifestations of the ecological naturing process of the Earth. They help us illustrate human adaptive decisions about where to live and what weather patterns, animals, and plants are beneficial or harmful to human wellbeing. For example, the Idu Mishmi’s shamanic guidance for healing and for communication with the supernatural world shows local human–nature interactions based on what and who brings harm or benefit to human health and prosperity [39]. Likewise, the Adi, the Bhutanese, the Erma, the Lepcha, and the Tibetans hold their respective traditions of cherishing the animatedness of the Earth manifest in the mountains, rivers, forests, and human communities. The spiritual contents of the Earth thus represent the lively activities of nature that release or withhold rain from the sky, retain or reduce the fertility of the land, and provide or deprive the health and wealth of humans. Nature’s incessant naturing process is both ecological and spiritual.

The traditional understandings of nature compel us to put the indigenous meanings back into our contemporary native words and phrases that now exclusively connote Western concepts. Our decolonial endeavors are thus called on to revitalize the eroding native ecospiritual meanings of humanity, and to highlight the planetary relevance of our local stories, particularly those from smaller nations and ethnocultural communities. Their economic and political marginalization shall not shroud the remembered fact that they hold panhumanly intelligible knowledges of sustainable, ethical living with what nature locally provides. As more and more environmental humanists worldwide recognize indigenous knowledges as invaluable for reconstructing planetary ethics in the Anthropocene [70,86], we would like to speak first-handedly of our more-than-human worlds and expand our conversations and constructive debates with our Northern colleagues concerning the fundamental meanings of ecological humanity and the personhoods of nature and nonhuman beings in our regions. If the Northern scientific ideas and concepts can make a home in our native languages and social ethos, why cannot traditional knowledges from the South be cherished and introduced into the languages and environmental consciousness of Northern societies?

Our existing research findings have already convinced us that the planetary and the local are part and parcel of one another except their differences in scale [15,87]. Their geo-ecological mutual embodiment forbids us to pigeon-hole them into two entirely divergent conceptual silos. We are thus more than ready to join the planetary call for interweaving traditional knowledges with their modern scientific counterparts that are open to non-Western ways of participating in the liveliness of nature [26,27,88]. We foresee the outcome of our humanist, tapestry-weaving endeavors as a planetary environmental humanities. Its planetarity is foregrounded in our already-tested symbiotic approaches [13,89] to local and regional environmental studies in the greater Himalayan region and also lies in our current intent to join the interdisciplinary undertaking of transitioning the Anthropocene as a syndrome of human-induced climatic challenges and environmental degradations to the symbiocene as “a new epoch of planetary health” in which “mutualism will be considered imperative” [90].

The mutualism takes place not only among scientists and between different human societies, but also requires us to practice mutualism with the earth’s own commoning process [4,12,89] in the language of her planetary tectonic shifts, climate changes, environmental flows, multispecies habitat-making, and ensoulment of the affective worlds of humans and nonhumans. It is imperative that human commoning of natural resources only takes place within the planetary boundary of the Earth’s own geological–ecological distribution of nature’s provisions to all life communities. The intelligence of Planet Earth undoubtedly speaks through human “empathy, cultural competency, emotional intelligence, and commitment to optimism” [90].

This said, our intended environmental humanities South is an instrument of Earth–human mutualism. On the human part, while our ancestral experiences of the Earth are geographically, ecologically, and ethnoculturally specific, the wisdoms born from them are an inherent part of the planetary human nature heritage. Their local ethical principles are panhumanly communicative and actionable when they are properly translated into an environmental language accessible to scientists, scholars, and policymakers committed to building sustainable futures.