Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore how river became a sign of temporality and political concern for the Bugkalot, an indigenous people of the Philippines, and how linearity of climate change was used as an excuse to evade corporate responsibility by the developer.

Paper long abstract:

California Energy is the largest independent geothermal power company in the world. In 1995, it secured a BOT project with the Philippine government to build the multi-purpose Casecnan Dam in the Bugkalot/Ilongot ancestral domain. The dam provides water for irrigation and hydroelectric power generation while its reservoir affords flood control. The Bugkalot have been involved in long-term disputes with Cal-Energy, and they started a new wave of protest in 2013 to demand compensations for environmental damages and the loss of biodiversity which they sustain as a result of the project. If in the Anthropocene time might come toward us from the future (Latour 2013), for the Bugkalot the river is a sign of temporality. Since the construction of the Casecnan Dam, they have experienced severe droughts and irregular floods that seemed to disrupt the alternation of dry season and rainy season, but the DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) concluded this was due to global climate change. While climate change was regarded as linear and used to evade corporate responsibility by Cal-Energy, the Bugkalot�s resistance was informed by the way in which river featured in their traditional culture. In the headhunting past, collective fishing served as an importance occasion for exchange, conviviality and peace negotiation. In the present, the Bugkalot attempt to construct ancestral lands and rivers as culture heritages essential for their sustainable future in the age of development.

Paper short abstract:

In my speech I discuss the role of ritual timeline and weather forecasting in climate change. Since it no longer is (or never was) parallel to weather occurrences I consider it in the context of identity, belonging, safety and stability that build the illusion of permanence and immutability.

Paper long abstract:

In the fall of 2022 I have started the project entitled "Analysis of the relation between anthropogenic climate change and local practices towards intangible cultural heritage", funded by the Polish National Science Center (Ref. DEC-2022/06/X/HS2/00741). The aim of the research is to analyze the impact of the climate crisis on Polish rituals and customs related to the growing season, annual snow retention cycle (Bolin 2009) and surface water levels. Polish ritual year, consisting of religious holidays and symbolic dates of certain weather phenomena, which designate the time of particular actions, expresses people's efforts to tame and organize the environment. The timeline and corresponding weather occurences are related to the beliefs of folk meteorology, crucial for gardeners and farmers. Weather forecasting stemmed from the need to plan and prepare for changing or adverse weather conditions generating crop losses and famine. Connections between observations and weather changes were fixed in the consciousness of generations in the form of specific dates and orally transmitted proverbs, though its meteorological verifiability remains undefined. Long-term agrarian and social predictions are based on mythological thinking and do not reflect the climate conditions. In my presentation I shall discuss the role of ritual timeline in the face of climate change. Since it no longer is (or never was) parallel to weather occurrences I consider it providing the feeling of identity, belonging, safety and stability that together build the illusion of permanence and immutability.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Norwegian and Costa Rican farmers’ relations with soils as sites of emergency and transformation provoke particular soil rhythms and temporalities that in turn may reveal farmers’ perceptions, responses, and urgency (or not) toward climate change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper treats agricultural fertilizing practices as an intake to investigate the relationship between knowledges, soil temporalities and climate change. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among farmers across three productions in Norway and Costa Rica, this paper explores how farmers relate to agricultural soils and other more-than human beings in context of national policy plans that aspire toward carbon neutral agricultural sectors through “decarbonizing” measures. In this context, national and international governance bodies and farmers consider that soils contribute to climate change mitigation due to their perceived potential for atmospheric carbon capture and storage. Simultaneously, farmers in both countries experience to different degrees soil related challenges such as soil compaction, soil runoff, and yield loss that are all exacerbated by extreme weather events. Soil thus becomes a dual site of emergency and transformation. Soil emergencies combined with the climate change threat have resulted in the emergence of a variety of agricultural models that either seek to intensify, partly change, or break away from established approaches, knowledges, and soil related practices – the goal supposedly being sustainable agriculture. As these models gain momentum to varying extents, so are different soil rhythms and temporalities set into motion wherein soil health and fertility becomes a continual and ongoing process, rather than a static stage that can be reached at one point in time.

How do farmers’ particular relations with soils provoke particular soil rhythms and temporalities? And what can these relations reveal about farmers’ perceptions, responses, and urgency (or not) toward climate change?

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on how my informants conversed about maltempo (bad weather) in Sicily, I discuss how their everyday experiences of change may become a temporal discourse, wherein climate change is acknowledged, negotiated or refused. Such dynamic ways of thinking about change, I call tempo experience.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, Sicily has seen an increase in lemon farmers’ transition toward tropical-fruit cultivation. This was often considered a climate change adaptation strategy by media. However, my interlocutors rarely mentioned climate change unless I asked. They instead discussed unusual, unexpected or unwelcome changes, associated with maltempo (bad weather).

The Italian word tempo signifies time, rhythm and weather. As a standalone word maltempo refers to rain, cold temperature or extreme weather events – a disruption of the everyday tempo. While it is a cultural concept, people’s subjective accounts of maltempo becomes a conduit to investigate how changes in the temporal patterning are noticed, and how that becomes part of the place-specific, climate change discourse. One lemon producer once told me that climate change was less of concern than maltempo. The recent hailstorm resulted not only in immediate losses but also delayed devastation, as tempo disruptions occurred in a chain of causality. Maltempo was contrasted with ‘predictable’ climate futures, where his newly started avocado cultivation would benefit from the warming climate.

I learned that the temporality of climate change is protracted and at times punctuated, shaping and shaped by how people envisage futures through the patterning of weather conditions. Thinking together with William Connolly’s (2017) ‘bumpy temporalities’, I call such dynamic and spatial-temporal ways of experiencing and thinking about change, tempo experience. I argue that people’s everyday narratives emerging from their experiences of and ideas about change may become a temporal discourse, wherein climate change is acknowledged, negotiated or refused across temporalities.

References

Connolly, William. 2017. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press.