Irrigating the Future: Justice, Emancipation and lessons from the past, a critical discourse analysis

Sammanfattning: Confronting ecological crises is leading many researchers and academics to take a renewed interest in the deep past. The archaeological and climatic record are posed as a source of lessons that can be brought to bear on current issues of sustainability. IHOPE, or Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, presents one such effort, a collaborative and inter-disciplinary project with aims to contribute to a better future for humanity through lessons from the past. Such efforts must however be ready to traverse the rough terrain of environmental and social justice discourses, issues that lie at the heart of ecological crises everywhere and without which no meaningful engagement with sustainability can be had. I outline the discursive spaces that exist within such efforts, focusing on the long standing IHOPE-Maya project centred around past socio-ecological change in the Yucatán. I employ dialectic theory and critical discourse analysis to map out these spaces. I conclude that the reliance of IHOPE-Maya researchers on three discourses - resilience discourse, complex adaptive systems discourse and anthropos discourse – place in many ways severe constraints on incorporating social and environmental justice discourses. Moving on I suggest possibilities for creative tensions which could be explored for the benefit of a truly integrated history and future.