Contamination, Climate Change, and Cosmopolitical Resonance in Kaata, Bolivia

Abstract

Climate change in Kaata connotes the epochal transformation of a landscape composed of exchange relationships between humans and non-humans, to a modernity in which non-humans are treated as mere “resources” for human exploitation. Consumer waste and agricultural chemicals are simultaneously “contaminating” humans, land, and animals, increasingly sickly and weak. This is a fractal landscape with symmetry over scale in which humans and landscape reflect one another. Communicating these insights to moderns, we come across hidden aspects of our own experience, creating cosmopolitical connections. It is considered that the mountain deities, when the snows of the last glaciers melt, will call time on human exploitation by subsuming the landscape in a sea of lava. This reversal of the contemporary order echoes the ancient mythic trope of pachakuti (“cosmic revolution”), a periodic reversal that sees worlds end and new ontological orders emerge.