Julie Cupples
Lecturer, Geography and Cultural Studies
“People talk about saving the planet –
and it’s like, actually it’s not the planet
that’s going to be destroyed, it’s us.”
Brimming with knowledge and ideas, Dr. Julie Cupples is passionate about her research, and the way she explains the concepts associated with her take on climate change is thoroughly engaging. A lecturer in Geography and Cultural Studies, her main research area is Development Studies, which is about understanding global inequalities and how they get “perpetuated, resisted or undermined” in different ways.
With a lilting accent, Julie uses a mixture of academic and everyday vocabulary. She was raised and educated in the UK, and now lives in Aotearoa. Much of her research however, has focused on Nicaragua, which she first became interested in during the 1980’s when the Central American nation was undergoing a political revolution.
“Reagan was in power, and this huge solidarity movement developed around Nicaragua so I got involved in that,” she says. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front lost the election in 1990, Julie decided that she couldn’t put off going to Nicaragua any longer. Her first visit was as a member of an environmental brigade to work on the prevention of soil erosion.
“We did some reforestation work and dug trenches on hillsides where people grow crops. I got totally hooked on Nicaragua and I’ve been going back ever since.”
For her PhD on gender and development, Julie planned to focus on the high incidence of single motherhood in Nicaragua. “I was interested in single mothers who didn’t conform to the ideal of the nuclear family, and there were a lot of really politically active women who were also the main income earners. So I was looking at the negotiation of motherhood, work, and political activism – but then a major hurricane hit my field site just before I went.”
That hurricane was Hurricane Mitch, which ripped through Central America for more than two weeks during October and November of 1998, causing over 3800 fatalities in Nicaragua alone. “I ended up getting into the whole hazard and disaster area,” says Julie. “So that’s another facet of what I do.”
Almost a decade later, another hurricane would redirect the course of Julie’s research. With a trip planned to study broader citizenship issues, Julie arrived a few days after Hurricane Felix in September 2007, and has returned to Nicaragua several times since. Her experiences are included in a book she is writing on the biopolitics of climate change. In the study of biopolitics, Julie has been inspired by Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s take on globalization, in particular the key idea “that there is no outside to Empire – and that the resistance to Empire comes from within.”
One area which particularly interests Julie is the Miskito Cays. This group of sandbars fifty miles off the eastern coast of Nicaragua was home to a thriving lobster industry, where indigenous men were employed as divers and accommodated in houses built on stilts. As such, the inhabitants of the area were described by organisations such as the Red Cross and Oxfam as living on the ‘front lines of climate change’.
Julie was fascinated by the multifaceted economies that formed around the lobster fishery – an industry that was destroyed by the hurricane. “There were lots of women who would get a boat, and go out for two weeks at a time, laden with products to sell: beer, biscuits, chicken, clothing, marijuana, a whole bunch of things. They’d sell this produce to the divers who were out there for two weeks, and then they’d buy lobster and take it back to the mainland to sell to the export companies.
“It was like an informal free trade zone. There’s the formal global economy based on the lobster and there’s the illegal economy, based on the presence of Columbian drug traffickers in the area, and then there’s the informal, very gendered economy with women going out there selling stuff to the male divers. And the whole thing was completely destroyed by Hurricane Felix.”
Julie says that whilst the approach of charitable organisations is “incredibly well intentioned”, it is also highly problematic because it frames indigenous peoples as: “vulnerable, and somehow external to the global economy, which of course they’re not – these people are thoroughly implicated in the global economy and have been for a couple of centuries.”
Thus, in the book, Julie is concerned with taking a broader approach to climate change that includes indigenous knowledges. “It’s not in any way trying to displace the scientific work or orthodoxy that climate change is a problem – I take that as given – but one of the problems is the ways in which those approaches are generating fear and fatalism.
“It’s like ‘Aggghhh, there’s this big apocalyptic future coming’ and it’s very difficult to know what to do, so there’s this sense that ‘if I just take my own bags to the supermarket, is that really going to make a difference?’ It’s hard to mobilise people.”
Julie explains that biopolitics has two meanings and that she is exploring both. “It’s biopolitics in the negative sense – so the targeting of vulnerable indigenous people as victims of climate change, but then there’s also the more liberatory positive idea of biopolitics as a life politics. In the Miskito Cays there are all these indigenous knowledges which continue to assert themselves.”
One of these is the Miskito belief in supernatural creatures that are there to protect the environment. Julie tells me about Liwa Mairin, “a mermaid type figure who is the protector of the sea dwelling creatures.” Hence, when an over-exploited diver, diving “too deep for too long, sometimes twelve, or fifteen times a day” ends up paralysed or with the bends, it is believed that Liwa is punishing them for over-exploiting the resource.
“So these knowledges are actually much more effective in terms of environmental protection than some mathematical, predictive climate model. It’s looking at the ways in which dominant discourses of climate change can have a disempowering effect, and how we need to bring more elements into the debate and include things like indigenous knowledges.
“The other thing I’m trying to do is disrupt the humanism of the whole climate change debate – you know, people talk about saving the planet – and it’s like, actually it’s not the planet that’s going to be destroyed, it’s us.”
Julie’s understanding of the broader issues of climate change also gives her insight into the everyday challenges of trying to live sustainably. “We need to get through the politics of limits,” she says. “More than half of New Zealand’s climate change emissions come from our farm animals, so moving to a vegetarian or vegan diet can help a lot. I haven’t eaten meat since the ‘80’s, but I understand how meat eating is really culturally embedded. There are different ways of being sustainable, and there’s a lot of focus on how you get to work, but no focus on what you’re cleaning your house with, who’s doing what in the household, or what is the gender division of labour.”
One area of sustainability where Julie has particular knowledge is Fair Trade coffee. “For me, it’s a no brainer,” she says. “Nicaragua is a coffee growing country and those that sell to the Fair Trade market, their kids go to school, they’ve got clothes, shoes, and food on the table. They have a dignified life and they grow something that we love. So it’s a really positive form of economic exchange.”
“For me, it’s like you can buy the coffee of life, the coffee that gives life, or you can buy the coffee of death, the coffee that causes malnutrition, starvation.”
For Julie, politics is intricately tied up with how we live, and she believes in fairness. She suggests putting a surcharge on all the meat and dairy products sold on campus, which would reward non-meat eaters for their contribution to sustainable living, in a similar way that parking fees reward cyclists for not using cars. Great idea – good for the ‘planet’, and likely to make the vegetarians and vegans on campus (whose choices are limited at the moment) very, very happy.
As Julie understands, when you take into account a range of cultural knowledges, there are a greater range of solutions available.
Profile by Sharon McIver