By: Fronika de Witt

“A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to “optimize ” climate.”

Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”, 2002

“Being an Onanya is not only about healing: it is about treating well our territory, love for our family, for the forest, plants and biodiversity.”

First Shipibo Konibo, Xetebo’ Traditional Medicine Convention, 2018

The citations above highlight tensions in dealing with current planetary challenges, such as climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. The first epigraph comes from a highly cited article in the scientific journal Nature by the Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, who coined the term ‘the Anthropocene’: our current geological epoch with significant human impact on the environment.

The second epigraph are words from a Shipibo shaman, an indigenous people that lives alongside the Ucayali river in the Peruvian Amazon. In 2018, I spent three months in the Peruvian department of Ucayali to conduct fieldwork for my doctoral research on Amazon climate governance and indigenous knowledge. In general, my fieldwork was a very enriching experience, but the “cherry on the pie”, in terms of indigenous perspectives on climate change, was an invitation for the first “‘Shipibo Konibo, Xetebo’ Traditional Medicine Convention”, where I heard the above words.

In this post, I depict some of the Convention’s main insights. However, first I elaborate more on the tension between the two epigraphs, or, as the Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar puts it: the tension between modernist and ontological politics.