Spokespeople for a Mute Nature: The Case of the villa Rodrigo Bueno in Buenos Aires

CARMAN, MARÍA

Sustainability as Myth and Practice in the Global City.

ACS/Mellon Post Doc Environmental Studies, USA.

Año: 2015; p. 76 - 98

What circumstances enable environmental arguments to gain social recognition? Who are the authorized spokespeople for silent nature? How can an eviction policy, a policy that stigmatizes the urban poor as ?anti-ecological? and therefore not fully ?human?, be narrated in such a way as to obtain legitimacy? This article examines the emergence of new environmental rhetorics in social conflicts regarding informal occupants and evictions, on the one hand, and in the stigmatization of the ?counter-uses? of land by low income sectors, on the other. Through the analysis of a case study ?the villa Rodrigo Bueno adjacent to the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve in Buenos Aires? I will contend that depriving the villa dwellers of their human condition enables the exercise of government violence upon them. I particularly address one of the key operations in achieving this deprivation of humanity: the assertion of the anti-ecological status of these ?undesirable dwellers?, implying that the poor impact negatively on the ecosystem and on the life prospects of animals that live in the reserve.