Holding Green Commons: Vandana Shiva’s Spirit-Lanterned Guardians

Building on a recent article that identifies a “dancing ecofeminist logic” in Australian logician Val Plumwood and pairs it with Australian sociologist Ariel Salleh’s “ethics of holding,” the present article further elaborates this logical ethics into a transgender ethics of “holding green commons” in Indian philosopher of science and ecological activist Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (2016).

I then bolster this ethics by partnering it with Spirit/Dance (a reconstruction of global spiritual practices of the poor) to highlight these spiritual practitioners as “spirit-lanterned guardians,” inspired by the heroic protestors of the Chipko land rights movement in India, who channeled Hindu spirits and carried lanterns in the daylight, to symbolize their silvicultural wisdom defending the forest. Finally, I identify five such guardians in the Global North today: three fictional “spirits” (Peter Pan, Green Lantern, and Robin Hood) and two present-day ecofeminist activists, namely martyred “Cop City” protestor and forest defender Tortuguita Terán and the interdisciplinary movement artist jill sigman/thinkdance.