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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Gruppuso
(University of Catania)
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen)
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- Discussant:
-
Tim Ingold
(University of Aberdeen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/026
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In conservation nature is an asset protected by boundaries that often engender conflicts. This panel challenges such ideas of protecting a common nature, and invites papers exploring conservation as a more-than-human endeavour of 'taking care together' amid asymmetries and differences.
Long Abstract:
Around 17 percent of Earth's land and 10 percent of the ocean are under different kinds of conservation regimes. Calls have been made to increase such percentages and to protect 'half Earth', thus transforming the globe into an immense network of conservation areas. By envisioning nature as an asset protected by boundaries aimed at keeping nature in and people out, these approaches disempower local and Indigenous communities, and engender contestations. Moreover, they often result in neglecting smaller areas that are ecologically significant, and may be counterproductive if not aligned with sociopolitical and economic transformations. It is then urgent to rethink conservation in a way that supports justice for both human and other-than-human beings.
Going beyond the idea of protecting a passive, fragile and objectified nature, this panel approaches conservation from its etymology of 'cum servare', as a collective and more-than-human process, growing from convivial practices of 'taking care together'. It proposes a shift from the anthropocentric idea of protecting a common nature, to an ethics of care; involving collective processes of maintaining ecological, political, social, biological and affective relations across diverse human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Instead of being founded upon a notion of homogenous community or shared essence, more-than-human commoning holds asymmetries and differences in tension, while enabling temporal practices of 'maintaining life together'. We invite papers that reflect on such processes and that explore possibilities of more-than-human commoning within, outside or at the edges of institutionalised forms of conservation, from ethnographic, historical, and speculative perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Malgorzata Zofia Kowalska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Paper short abstract:
My research challenges the division between a top-down conservation program and the community by identifying more-than-human entanglements, and staging collaborations. It proposes attentive participation, and exposition to the possibility of discussing nature conservation as sociality beyond humans.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses engaged research in a valuable biocoenosis protected under the nature protection program Natura 2000 and simultaneously an area of a multidirectional anthropogenic pressure (including opencast mining, fishing, agriculture, and tourism). The field site is the Niedziegiel Lake of the Gnieznienskie Lakeland in central Poland, which I have known for almost twenty years. However, only recently I have started learning about the specificity of the habitats protected within the area, and how the declining rainfall patterns and desertification of the region threaten their existence.
One of them are the stoneworts benthic meadows. Chara spp. are “engineer” algae who sustain the high level of the clarity of the lake, but at the same time are vulnerable to the processes of eutrophication and changing water relations. Their sustainability is crucial for the maintenance of the current character and functions of the Lake, yet especially important in the face of the advancing environmental degradation.
The endeavor moves beyond understanding Natura 2000 as a top-down expertise-based conservation program where nature is objectified and external. While learning about the Chara meadows as well as other species in the area under the guidance of biologists, fishermen and environmental activists, I examine the possibilities of thinking of the protected area as a more-than-human web of entanglements, interdependencies and care. The project aims at staging encounters between the experts and the community, shifting responsibilities, and encompassing more-than-human constituents in the emerging sociality.
Anke Tonnaer (Radboud University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the concept of care in the political, affective and material messiness in more-than-human relations in nature conservation in the highly contested and restricted natural environments of the Netherlands.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the concept of care in the political, affective and material messiness in more-than-human relations in nature conservation in the highly contested and restricted natural environments of the Netherlands. With the established return of the wolf and expanding re-wilding initiatives the question of which species are worthy of care has become politically divisive, leading to protests and sometimes violent actions, subverting official ecological management. In particular I consider the fraught relations between different groups of humans and the animals that live within boundaries of a central re-wilded National Park, which since its creation has been controversial, especially for how life and death are conceptualised as part of wild nature. I suggest that these more-than-human tensions reveal specific gendered value hierarchies of care. Common expert notions of ecology that have founded and run rewilding projects have a perceptible masculine character, which frames the relation to the environment in a distinct rationalized way, seeing death as part of the natural course that nature sometimes takes. Lay views on nature management, particularly expressed by female activists, insist on alternative relations of care, that acknowledge the call of reciprocal obligation that comes forth from living in entangled and interdependent worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), leading them to climb the fences of the park to start feeding animals of their own accord. This paper thus discusses how the material and situated condition of a politics of care comes to be articulated in matters of loving and dying in more-than-human entanglements.
Sarah C. Moritz (Thompson Rivers University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on collaborative ethnographic research, this paper contextualises a particular Interior Salish Nk̓yáp (Coyote) transformer story in place, time and within an ongoing ethos of care for the land that instructs on shared happiness and a good life for all beings in times of radical change.
Paper long abstract:
Interior Salish transformer stories and distinctive place names about the shared characteristics, identities and actions of humans, non-humans and places, instruct on the nature, origins and changes within this relationship. They guide on Indigenous legal traditions, their origins, sources, lineages and continuity. They sustain visions and strategies for political action, environmental protection, language and cultural revitalization. They bolster the articulation of presence and ownership vis-à-vis colonial and resource-extractive policies and institutions. Based on long-term collaborative ethnographic partnership with Upper St'át'ímc Elders, this paper contextualises a particular Nk̓yáp (Coyote) transformer story in place, time and a practice of caring for the land. Frequently, this story is employed to educate on trickstery, control, disenchantment and negative reciprocity. Simultanenously, it informs about positive reciprocity, astonishment, respectful, practical and moral conduct in times of radical social and environmental transformation. It highlights a particular St’át’ímc ethos of care and law of the land that humans and non-humans employ to continuously recreate a ‘land of plenty’ toward a good life for all beings and that allows people to reclaim vital areas in the Bridge River Valley on a territorial basis also pre-empted by colonial, capitalist and industrial institutions. It serves to articulate the right way to relate to the land, all its inhabitants as well as newcomers. This particular law of the land is Tśíl in St'át'ímcets, or happiness. Lessons will be drawn for collaborative research that includes human and non-human perspectives and toward the generative politics of storytelling and naming within an inclusive community-of-life.
Ferne Edwards (City, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the multi-species city and the emergence of care in conservation through urban beekeeping and native bee conservation practices.
Paper long abstract:
It is widely recognized that nature in cities no longer conforms to an idealized vision of pristine wilderness. Urbanization destroys habitats that support nonhuman species, while the city becomes a potential site of refuge as it morphs into a novel ecosystem (Collier and Dewitt 2016). This urban evolution introduces possibilities for human/nonhuman coexistence: cities can benefit from endemic and exotic species (Marris 2013), while visibility of diverse natures can encourage people to become more aware, attentive and care ‘full’ towards a wider world (Soga and Gaston 2016). In this sense, the city becomes a multi-species commons: a shared, more-than-human space where new entanglements proliferate.
However, such heightened proximities also introduce potential tensions between human and nonhuman residents. This paper explores conflicts, opportunities and the emergence of care between urban beekeepers and native bee conservation practices. City bees navigate changing identities and values whilst stirring human emotions: occupying territories of exotic versus endemic, they elicit hope through pollination and urban greening, solidarity through social practices, or conversely, can cause grief, anger and fear through Colony Collapse Disorder, swarms and stings. This paper explores how people are both ‘common-ing across’ into insect worlds, while questioning how care is or could be expressed between wild and domesticated bees in the multi-species city. This paper draws on qualitative research of beekeeping conducted in Australian and Norwegian cities, complemented by citizen science projects from around the world. By examining intersecting perspectives around bees, this paper seeks to understand how care can contribute to urban conservation.