Brainstorm 9 - Haleh Mawson

The idea of buen vivir that we read about last week seems closely related to the Chicana/o goodlife and the general North American Indian way of being described by Million. I'll start with the former: Goodlife writing seems to me like the precursor to American desert ecophilosophy a la Edward Abbey and his ilk, the full and breathing body to Desert Solitaire's shadow. It deals with humanity and the land together, the place of a person in the ecosystem, history, and the community. More than that, Solis Ybarra says that it must link its subject, agriculture, nature, daily life, with "larger oppressions of colonization, imperialism, modernity, and neoliberal globalization" (18), since what occurs on a small scale has its roots in the large scale, and vice versa. It also deals with the tension between the fact that one cannot actually own land and the desire to claim a place as one's own. The latter article describes similar beliefs, albeit not in a literary context. The environment, physical, ecological, and communal, is living and inextricable from one's own being. Million gets into a lot more than that in offering an overview of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, but that's the big connection I can see. At the root of it, the universe and all its inhabitants are composed of the same matter or spirit, and any interaction should therefore be predicated on the idea of "equity and balance" (Million 102, quoting Kim Anderson).