An Ontology of Degradation: Thinking Degradation Through the “Life of a Lake”

• In Event: Ontologies of Environmental Governance - II

Abstract

With growing environmental crisis, the conventional governance approaches from ecosystem services to ecotourism are largely under criticism of not providing any substantial solutions. The larger problem is the ontological frame of these approaches conceptualizing the nature-as-a-resource. recently, ontological turn has urge to shift the ontological frame to explore the world otherwise. Through such underpinning of thinking of world otherwise, I provide an ethnographic example of Manchar Lake, one of the largest and oldest freshwater lakes in South Asia, which has been degrading for three decades due to industrial, agricultural, and domestic effluents. I ask what solutions to degradation we could imagine “otherwise,” if the lake is thought of as having a “life,” rather than just as a resource? Water governance institutions operating through a neoliberal ontology conceptualize the lake as a resource, shaping how they envision its degradation; that is, merely as a livelihood problem for indigenous fisher folk. The proposed solutions with depleting fish and biodiversity at Manchar Lake, governance institutions have introduced a nonlocal toxic fish species for fisher folk to catch for their livelihood, and recently a growing ecotourism program to mitigate the effects of degradation. However, for fisher folks the degradation of the lake goes beyond livelihoods; it is degradation of the “life of the lake,” as one fisher put it. I argue that to imagine the life of the lake and solutions to its degradation otherwise, we should step outside of neoliberal ontology to think with and through the “life of the lake,” which is relational and constitutive of the humans, nonhuman beings, and other vital nonliving entities.

Author

• Suneel Kumar, Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia