More-than-Human Lifeworlds: Ethics, Ontology and Relationality in Local Environmental Struggles

Abstract

Local environmental conflicts are often framed as “resource conflicts” in the political ecology literature. Based on ethnographic research on local community struggles against run-of-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region, this article aims to demonstrate the limitation of the “resource” frame in explaining the grievances of environmentally dispossessed communities and their motivations to fight against it. The article discusses how and why rivers are more than “natural resources” for the rural communities of the region, maintaining non-human entities as integral not only to the umwelt (environment, surroundings), but also to the lebenswelt (lifeworld). It develops a bodycentred, phenomenological perspective demonstrating how non-human entities become an essential part of our experiential and social world through habitual and corporeal encounter and interaction. It maintains the centrality of the more-than-human lifeworld in the constitution of relational ontologies and ethics of coexistence, and in the formation of political agency.