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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Gruppuso
(University of Munich (LMU))
Sara Asu Schroer (University of Oslo)
Andrew Whitehouse (University of Aberdeen)
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- Discussant:
-
Tim Ingold
(University of Aberdeen)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Great Hall
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 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 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically explores how farmers in southeast Norway relate differently to ideas of conservation through practices of care that seek to work with nature. How do farmers approach agricultural soils in efforts to stimulate convivial relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds?
Paper long abstract:
Agricultural soils are not subject to conservation regimes in the conventional sense of drawing boundaries between keeping nature in and humans out. Conservation as a concept is nevertheless analytically interesting to apply when considering contemporary soil emergencies and transformations provoked by ecosystem changes. Within this context emerge novel ways of relating to, and caring for, soils.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among grain farmers in southeast Norway, this paper explores soils as sites of contestation in terms of their management. To varying degrees proponents of conservation- and regenerative agriculture challenge the hegemonic mode of practicing agriculture, along with the prevailing perception of soils as a passive medium of growth – an idea that arguably has developed in tandem with an agro-industrial model that favors efficiency and volume. Farmers that practice these seemingly novel approaches rethink and refamiliarize themselves with soils in attempts to confront soil related challenges. Contrary to the established mode of agricultural practice which typically undercommunicates soil biology, these farmers aspire to learn from soils, improve them, and care for its living beings by tuning in to ecosystem rhythms. In doing so, they arguably engage in an ethics of care that can be considered as more-than-human life-making projects. This ethics of care is differently constituted from that of the established mode of agriculture.
How do farmers approach agricultural soils in efforts to stimulate convivial relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds? What kinds of temporalities and rhythms emerge through conservative and regenerative ethics of care for more-than human lifeworlds?
Paper short abstract:
In Scotland, rethinking conservation after the COVID-19 pandemic must include conceptualisations of landscapes as spaces of danger, beauty, disease, and health. This paper discusses the role of the Scottish Highlands in Lyme disease, COVID-19, and the relationship between conservation and infection.
Paper long abstract:
Scotland's nature and the national past-time of hillwalking are seeped in topophilia inspiring literature, films, and passionate discussions on nature's wilderness, domesticity, and stewardship. But, Scotland, in particular the Scottish Highlands, also has the highest incidence of Lyme disease in Europe, a complex multi-organ illness caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. However, little to nothing is published about Lyme disease on tourist websites dedicated to Scotland's great outdoors and the illness remains poorly understood.
This paper, based on 12 months ethnographic research, asks how conservation can take illness into account by exploring multispecies relationships in Lyme disease during the COVID-19 pandemic. I first introduce which landscapes my interlocutors became infected in, and how patients conceptualise these landscapes post infection. I then introduce the ecologists and entomologists constructing the understanding of Scotland’s landscape epidemiology by researching ticks infected with B. burgdorferi. The main section of this paper then discusses Scottish nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, ecologists couldn't access fieldsites to survey tick infections and forester landscape maintenance (trimming tick habitat, Lyme disease signage) halted; during easing restrictions, access campaigners, political narratives, and tourism constructed Scotland's charismatic landscapes away from the possibility of danger and disease.
This paper discusses zoonosis in the more-than-human commoning of conservation, to ask: how can the more-than-human endeavour of taking care together include patients, disease, and how conservation conceptualises landscapes as spaces of danger, beauty, disease, and health?