Paper short abstract:

I document some of the crucial features of Land, Water, People and Culture in Belaga District, Sarawak in response to development.

Paper long abstract:

Angosto's comprehensive analysis of natural value in the commodification of a waterfall in Venezuela initiated this account of Lesai Lesung Laku at the Penan settlement on the Linau River of Belaga District Sarawak. This community has long been a source of products traded with the Orang Ulu, upriver people of the region. The Penan extracted rattan from the forests and wove it into elaborate backpacks and mats for consumption in the wider region. The Penan in association with Orang Ulu, upriver people, have long wished to extract value from their waterfall and to this end have built guest houses to accommodate a flow of visitors. The challenge for locals, however, is to keep control of that cultural production. Deprived of unlimited sources of land through their displacement from the Balui River to the Asap and Koyan Rivers the Orang Ulu of the area have struggled to find alternative sources of income. The Pang Doh, women's inter-community organization, the labour of the men, and local government and state governments intent on increasing the flow of tourists to Belaga, have explored several avenues to extract value from their land, water, people and culture. Their latest endeavour ended in the last days of October with a Pesta Apau Koyan so that they can put their place on the map (Trigger 2019).

Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to link what Blaikie and Brookfield terms "environmental symptoms" with the changes in post-displacement Bakun in terms of access and new economic conditions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the biodiversity effects of dispossession by dam-induced displacement on the upper Balui by the Bakun Hydroelectric Dam. Pre-displacement, protein in the diet of the Orang Ulu communities were brought home by fishermen, and hunters. Favoured species are mainly ungulates, including the bearded pig, muntjacs, mousedeer, sambar and some arboreal mammals, such as the various civet species. An extensive and intensive camera trapping exercise over nearly two years, yielding over 22,000 camera trap images and videos show that animal behaviour has changed, and extinction is starting to happen on the lake, radiating outwards from the jetty. Talking with the hunters, I discover a formerly integral longhouse demographic struggling to remain relevant in the post-displacement environment.

Paper short abstract:

I explore how agroecologists in Córdoba's green belt reject their simultaneous susceptibility to agro-chemicals and economic exclusion which a liberal approach to agro-industry has enabled. In place of liberalism, ecological thinking in Córdoba helps foment a commitment to nationalist-populism.

Paper long abstract:

In 2012, then Argentine president, Cristina Kirchner, announced an agreement with Monsanto for the construction of a seed processing plant in Malvinas Argentinas, a peri-urban locale on the outskirts of Córdoba. After three years of community resistance, the project was dropped. Malvinas Agroecologica, an agroecological farming collective, had emerged directly from that struggle, and yet, as a social movement were throwing their efforts behind the return to power of Cristina Kirchner. Thinking with the multiple resonances of domesticity in my ethnographic data, I explore why it is that the agroecological movement was aligning with a political figure so linked to agro-industrial development. I suggest that the particular attentiveness to the local which agroecology develops, foments a populist political subjectivity as farmers interact with plants and soil, redolent with nationalist and populist symbols. Agroecology also provides a language through which to protest their simultaneous economic exclusion and geographic susceptibility to agro-chemical poisoning. In contrast to the current liberalist approach - over which Malvinenses have neither choice nor ownership - I argue that Kirchner's project of nationalist-populism represents a domestication of agro-industry. Kirchnerism promises to re-configure the current distribution of risk and reward surrounding soy cultivation. It offers strong-arm, nationalist rebukes of industrial-agriculture's excesses, while simultaneously bringing home the financial benefits of the industry to peri-urban Cordobés through a return to the years of soy-funded redistributive policies.

Paper short abstract:

To many Cape York graziers, National Parks represents an unwanted incursion by the State and contributes to a sense of marginality. This paper examines how graziers shape narratives around land-use and environmental knowledge in contrast to Parks, to assert their right to belonging in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. The Queensland government has purchased many cattle stations, which are now incorporated into Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal Land National Parks (CYPAL NP). Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the "locking up" of Cape York by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 12 months of field research in south-east Cape York, I will examine the divergent ways in which graziers and Parks understand appropriate and inappropriate land-use, and how certain sets of values underpin their respective claims to the right to manage the land. While West (2016) investigates how institutionalised conservation draws local peoples into forms of engagement while simultaneously dispossessing them, the situation for graziers in Cape York differs. Rather than engagement, Parks' management strategies indicate that they want cattle and graziers off the Cape entirely. Graziers position themselves as those who "know the intimacies of the soil" due to multi-generational work on the land. They tend to sidestep the issue of prior Aboriginal occupation by claiming that local Aboriginal people have no interest in their particular piece of land. The paper aims to tease out inherent contradictions in CYPAL NP as a large-scale State actor seen by the graziers as an unwanted encroacher and an agency of dispossession, while it is the product of the Aboriginal land rights movement and State attempts to redress Aboriginal dispossession.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to make visible Yuin people's contemporary engagements with their urban land and sea Country. It explores stewardship initiatives deployed by Yuin rangers over their territories and the challenges they face in enacting their responsibilities and values in this highly contested space.

Paper long abstract:

There is perhaps no better 'environment' than urban areas to explore the discordances between capitalist and indigenous relations with the natural environment. In settler states such as Australia, urban and peri-urban areas are strongly associated with processes of assimilation, loss of indigeneity and traditional knowledge, of disconnection from ancestral territories and customary practices. Yet, in spite of the intense and ongoing processes of dispossession at play in such contexts, Indigenous peoples have continued to perform, reconstruct and reassert their cultures, values, roles, rights and responsibilities over their unceded territories.

Across the South Coast region of New South Wales, which hosts the towns of Batemans Bay and Mogo, urban developments, commercial fisheries, oyster farms, the Batemans Marine Park, and the buzzing touristic industry have made significant impressions on the region's land, freshwater and sea territories and Yuin's lifeways. They have also impacted on the capacity of Yuin rangers and broader communities to access parts of these territories and use and protect the resources they encompass.

This paper aims to make visible Yuin's contemporary engagements with their coastal land and sea Country. We will discuss some of the strategies undertaken by the South Coast Yuin rangers and Local Aboriginal Land Councils to enact, assert and reclaim their stewardship rights and responsibilities over the region's beaches, estuaries, rivers and rolling hills based on their values and knowledge (both Yuin and scientific) and the challenges they face in performing their way of life, aspirations, responsibilities and values in this highly contested space.