Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Irene van Oorschot
(Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Annelies Kuijpers (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Sophie van Balen (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- NU-5A57
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
Ours is an age of ecological disaster, including sudden extreme events as well as 'slow' processes of ecological degradation. Drawing on polychronic and topological approaches to time and temporality, this panel examines how different pasts and futures are enacted in the wake of such disasters.
Long Abstract:
In the Wake of Ecological Disaster: Navigating Pasts and Generating Futures
Ours is an age of ecological disaster. These disasters range from sudden extreme events such as forest fires, floods, or storms that disrupt life as usual, to more pernicious forms of slow violence such as ecological degradation and pollution. These disasters represent moments in which the past must be rethought and reckoned with, and potentially generative encounters within which alternative futures may be envisioned and enacted.
Drawing on Sharpe's concept of the wake (2016) this panel aims to attend to the way various publics – from environmental and governmental authorities, scientific experts, to engaged publics more broadly – engage with pasts and futures in response to sudden or slow ecological disaster. Being in the wake means that certain pasts, particularly pasts of domination, dispossession, and extraction, are not simply left behind (Sharpe 2016), and that the work we do in envisioning futures irrevocably takes place in the presence and present of these pasts.
Thinking about ecological disasters as inviting complex reworkings of temporality, this panel contributes to contemporary STS in teasing out the multiple and entangled (ecological, social, political) pasts and futures at play in (post-)disaster response practices and public formation around forms of slow ecological degradation. Drawing on polychronic and topological approaches to time (Bensaude-Vincent 2021) this panel furthermore complicates singular and progressive temporalities characteristic of transitions thinking, and engages with the material obduracy of the past in the present.
The organizers invite contributions that empirically engage with ecological disasters that probe the following questions: what human, as well as more-than-human temporalities are enacted in practices, imaginaries, and knowledges that respond to and proliferate in the wake/presence of ecological disasters? How do these confront and enact different pasts? And what are the implicit politics of such responses?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Western Canada’s increasingly devastating wildfires burn in the wake of settler colonial occupation and cultivation of the land. Kinship provides an unexpected register of response in which those histories demand revisitation, their ongoing presence is faced, and alternative futures are imagined.
Paper long abstract:
In 2023, Canada experienced its worst-ever wildfire season: over 18.5 million hectares of forest burned. As the scale, devastation, and potential long-term effects of wildfire begin to outstrip the imagination, different frameworks for understanding, relating and responding to it become imperative.
Taking inspiration from the etymology of ecology – from the Greek oikos, for house – this paper suggests that kinship offers rare means of grasping the full temporal and spatial scope of the ecological disasters that mark the climate crisis, and a repertoire of ethics, discourses and practices that Canadians repurpose in response. Kinship shares vast scales of time and space with the climate crisis: changes in the climate can only be observed across generations and global geographies, and family is an intergenerational undertaking, continuously reworking its histories to generate alternative futures, routinely stretched across the globe in its mobilities and imaginations. Kinship practice has played a crucial role in the settlement of Canada as a settler colony, too: wildfire burns in the wake of settler family practices of claiming, cultivating, dwelling on and conserving the land, its devastation in direct proportion to the dispossession, occupation and domination that enabled those undertakings. As wildfire demands and enables new ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to and through the land, it is often in the register of kinship that Canadians pursue experimental responses – confronting them with the uncomfortable truths of their settler colonial pasts, and opening creative potential for decolonial futures.
Paper short abstract:
Taking you on a journey through diverse forest stands on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, the Netherlands, this paper highlights how foresters try to transform these forest stands into climate-proof and resilient forests.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic research within the Dutch Forestry Agency - Staatsbosbeheer - this paper focuses on a crucial moment and technology in forestry: that of the inspection or schouw that precedes and informs more large-scale management interventions, including felling and logging. As Dutch forestry is moving away from plantation-style monocultural production forests towards more diverse, mixed, and therefore ideally more climate-adaptable forests, the inspection is a crucial moment for foresters to observe how forest stands are faring in changing conditions, and offer them the opportunity to calibrate their management plans.
Accompanying foresters in this task, I highlight how and what foresters come to know when they inspect ‘their’ forest. I specifically zoom in on temporal considerations and knowledges, ranging from the way foresters ‘read’ signs of past management practices and decisions in the landscape, to expectations about timber markets and market prices, and to speculations on multispecies relations as these are becoming over time in a forest. In so doing, this paper highlights the crucial role of multiple temporalities in the management of forests after – but in the continued presence of – the material legacies of disastrous monoculture plantations.
Paper short abstract:
The 'nitrogen crisis' necessitates radical transitions in the Netherlands. Here, I empirically trace nitrogen as it circulates in interviews and short-term ethnographic observations conducted on three cow farms. These circulations robe in several relevant histories and open up un/breathable futures.
Paper long abstract:
The sounding of a ‘nitrogen crisis’ (Raad van State, 2019) necessitates - among many things - an agricultural transition in the Netherlands, especially for cattle farming. Since 2019, effective policies have however failed to materialise. On the basis of short-term ethnographic observations and interviews on three cow farms in 2023, in this paper I argue that the bureaucratic-scientific nitrogen accounting system set up to manage the nitrogen crisis tends to generate ‘unbreathable futures’ (cf. Van Balen forthcoming) and trace two other circulations of 'nitrogen' at work in the data that bring into view relevant histories and open up other -breathable? - ways out of the crisis at hand.
Paper short abstract:
Nest boxes are vital objects in attempts to halt the loss of birds and of their breeding sites. I explore how nest boxes for swifts unfold as a multiple technology since the birds and their enthusiasts recuperate artefacts and experiences from the past, forging complex interspecific alliances.
Paper long abstract:
As in many cities, one of the ecological ravages that is ongoing in Brussels is the loss of its wildlife and their habitats. Among them, common swifts (Apus apus) are migrating and insectivorous birds that come back each summer to the same cavity, like eaves, ventilation holes, cracks, or putlog holes. In the last decades, new construction and renovation led to the destruction of these breeding sites, to the point that Brussels’s swifts have plummeted by half. This loss prompted a handful of swift enthusiasts to convert specific architectural interfaces into suitable cavities for the birds, sometimes with the support of the local authorities.
I look at these nest boxes as multiple technologies, each of them retrieving from past artefacts and experiences that carry distinct matters of concerns for swifts, their caretakers, and their co-becoming. Nest boxes are firstly reproductive technologies developed by the birds since ancient times, enacted as such at their own biosocial rhythm, and relying on architecture from specific epochs. Second, following ornithologists’ experiments from mid-20e century, city dwellers convert these nest boxes into technologies of vision, to watch over swifts’ daily life. Then, certain nest boxes draw inspiration from medieval towers built as breeding technologies, at a time when nestlings were appreciated as delicacies.
Nest boxes as multiple technologies assemble attempts to recuperate what can still be salvaged from different past times. I reflect on the path that such recuperations open for interspecific alliances, that is neither a restoration of authentic ‘nature’, nor a harmonious reconciliation.