Gamifying Climate & Crisis

Abstract:

Territories, including both land- and water-based, have long been considered as inert and thus subjected to human interests such as mining and fracking, often with little to no regard for both short and long-term consequences on the ecology. Despite these behaviors, humans have paradoxically deemed other kinds of territories to be more valuable, protecting them through legislative means for either their outstanding beauty, diverse ecology or other reasons determined to be worthy of protection. Still, with these efforts in place, there is the inherent issue that decisions affecting nature are being decided by humans based on manmade criteria and generally in their own interest. The recent introduction of nature as having rights derived from its own interest is perhaps the beginning of a paradigm shift at a larger and potentially global scale. If considered as an entity and imbued with agency, nature would rightly manage itself, towards self-determination, protecting itself while also engaging with us (as we do with it). What decisions might nature make, how might those decisions be carried out, and what legal recourse could enforce them? The following paper puts forward three case studies that examine territorial autonomy in their respective contexts, the ambition of which is to tease out new possibilities for what territorial autonomy might mean in the age of artificial intelligence, automation and ongoing capitalism.

Territories, including both land- and water-based, have long been considered as inert and thus subjected to human interests such as mining and fracking, often with little to no regard for both short and long-term consequences on the ecology. Despite these behaviors, humans have paradoxically deemed other kinds of territories to be more valuable, protecting them through legislative means for either their outstanding beauty, diverse ecology or other reasons determined to be worthy of protection. Still, with these efforts in place, there is the inherent issue that decisions affecting nature are being decided by humans based on manmade criteria and generally in their own interest. The recent introduction of nature as having rights derived from its own interest is perhaps the beginning of a paradigm shift at a larger and potentially global scale. If considered as an entity and imbued with agency, nature would rightly manage itself, towards self-determination, protecting itself while also engaging with us (as we do with it). What decisions might nature make, how might those decisions be carried out, and what legal recourse could enforce them? The following paper puts forward three case studies that examine territorial autonomy in their respective contexts, the ambition of which is to tease out new possibilities for what territorial autonomy might mean in the age of artificial intelligence, automation and ongoing capitalism.