Where the Word 'Resource' Has No Place

Natural resource, natural capital, sustainable resource management: our language files the living under what serves. A resource is a reserve—something to be extracted, managed, optimized. Even when we seek to protect it, we speak of it as a stock to be husbanded, entered somewhere in an accounting ledger. In the Andean highlands, around Lake Titicaca, an Aymara word organizes the world differently, and this word leaves no room for “resource”: ayllu.

The Aymara jurist and writer Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, who has gathered its meaning for an Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI, begins by warning that it is poorly translated. Ayllu, he says, is usually rendered as “community”—but the Spanish word, like ours, falls short. For the West, a community is a “social unit and structure”: it is made of humans. What Aymara calls ayllu is of another order.

Spanish

el ser humano es sólo una parte de esta unidad; animales, insectos, plantas, montañas, el aire, el agua, el sol, incluso lo que no se ve, nuestros ancestros y otros seres, son parte de la comunidad.

English

the human being is only one part of this unity; animals, insects, plants, mountains, air, water, the sun—even what cannot be seen, our ancestors and other beings—are part of the community.

Here, community is not the society of persons; it is the unity of all that lives. The human does not occupy its center but holds a thread within it. And from this expanse follows a consequence Huanacuni draws without hesitation: if everything in the ayllu belongs to the community of the living, then nothing is available as a thing.

Spanish

En el ayllu no hay lugar para el término “recurso”, ya que si todo vive, lo que existe son seres y no objetos, y el ser humano no es el único parámetro de vida ni es el rey de la creación.

English

In the ayllu, there is no place for the term “resource,” for if everything lives, what exists are beings, not objects—and the human being is neither the sole measure of life nor the king of creation.

The reasoning is brief and holds entirely. A resource is an object intended for use; yet in the ayllu, there are no objects—only beings. The mountain, the water, the insect, the ancestor are not reserves at humanity’s disposal, for the human is not the point from which the value of what exists is measured. Remove this center, and the word “resource” loses its ground: it no longer designates anything.

One might be tempted to see in this our own concern for the living—ecology, sustainable management, care for “nature.” The resemblance deserves to be kept at arm’s length before we trust it. Even our most attentive policies remain, almost always, ways of better managing a resource: sustainable yield, natural capital, renewable stocks. They refine the accounting; they do not escape it. The ayllu does not propose to manage the resource better—it refuses that the living be one. This is another root, not a gentler version of ours: one counts objects it wishes to spare, the other sees only beings that are not counted.

What remains is what the word does to those who hear it. We have learned to ask how best to manage our resources; the ayllu returns a different question, older and clearer: of what am I a member, not an owner? Where nothing that lives is a resource, the human ceases to be the king who takes. He becomes once more a thread in a fabric he did not weave alone.